Intrinsic Preferences for Choice Autonomy

Personal autonomy has been argued to be fundamental to well-being and is often discussed as an important driver of economic and political behavior. However, preferences for autonomy remain poorly understood. The major factor contributing to this limitation is the necessity to separate instrumental and intrinsic value components of autonomous choice. We propose a novel elicitation method that solves this identication challenge. We establish the existence of intrinsic preferences for choice autonomy and show substantial heterogeneity in a large online sample. We further study their antecedents by relating them to existing personality scales, socioeconomic characteristics and other attitudes.