The Economics of innate rewards

In the present paper, I propose to decompose decision utility into two fundamental sources of value, namely innate rewards (which humans innately experience because they used to provide humans with an evolutionary advantage, e.g. when eating sugary or fatty and thus nourishing food, when having positive social interactions...) and purely constructed values (which rely on a complex cognitive model of the world and how it should be according to the individual). I argue that (1) it allows to shed new light on a large range of economic behaviors and (2) to identify new sources of economic inefficiency in the typical intertemporal Social Welfare criteria, linked with the nowadays wide discrepancy between the innate rewards elicited by actions and these actions' desirability in the perspective of Humanity survival, as well as to the excessive role played by innate rewards in decision making in general. (3) I argue that the typical trade-offs implied by Welfare criteria, between present and future utility or present utility and Humanity extinction risk, could be strongly attenuated by the adoption of new types of policy measures aimed at (3.a) shaping the goods' and purchase situations' characteristics associated with innate rewards, so that behaviors maximizing the decision utility also minimize the Humanity extinction risk and (3.b) reducing the role of innate rewards with respect to purely constructed values in typical day-to-day economic decisions. (4) I briefly describe how such policy measures could be operationalized in practice.