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Interest in behavioral economics has grown in recent years, stimulated largely by accumu-lating evidence that the standard model of consumer decision-making provides an inadequate positive description of human behavior. Behavioral models are increasingly finding there way into policy evaluation, which inevitably involves welfare analysis. The welfare issues raised by behavioral economics have received much less attention than the positive issues. No consensus concerning the appropriate standards and criteria for behavioral welfare analysis has yet emerged. One common strategy in behavioral economics is to add arguments to the utility function (including all of the conditions upon which choice seems to depend) in order to rationalize choices. Unfortunately, such a utility function is problemmatic as a guide for normative analysis. In some instances, the normative implications are simply untenable. For example, if an individual’s decision depends on whether he has first viewed the last two digits of his social security number (as the literature on anchoring suggests), should the planner attempt to determine whether the individual has recently seen those digits before making a choice on his behalf? Perhaps more importantly, in many cases the nature and significance of
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