Nosy preferences, benevolence, and efficiency

We explore the implications of "nosy" preferences-when individuals have rankings over the specific actions of others-using recent theoretical results in the behavioral economics literature. Our model jointly captures preference interdependence over utilities (benevolence) and actions (nosiness). We apply the model to two well-known environments. The first is a classic social choice problem; the second is a model of relative consumption concerns. For the former we characterize the existence of the impossibility once the social choice problem has been modeled as a behavioral game. For the latter we characterize when the negative externality arising from relative consumption concerns can be overcome without a policy intervention.