Freedom counts: Cross-country empirical evidence

European Economic Review

Volume 176, July 2025, 105022

Abstract

We investigate whether people attach intrinsic value to freedom and which theoretical rules they implicitly employ to evaluate opportunity sets. To do this, we run a new survey-based study with 4902 participants across 10 different countries. Participants face various comparisons of opportunity sets in a policy-relevant context in a “spectator” position. Our main result is that an overwhelming majority of spectators reveal that they attach intrinsic value to freedom. We also find that a large majority of participants use size-based rules to rank sets in terms of freedom, while there is considerable heterogeneity in the theoretical rules they implicitly employ to rank sets in terms of welfare. These results are strikingly robust across countries.

João V. Ferreira ^a, Nobuyuki Hanaki ^b c, Fabrice Le Lec ^d, Erik Schokkaert ^e, Benoît Tarroux ^f