There is growing public concern about the ‘unfairness’ of many pricing practices that have become common in consumer, particularly digital, markets. Industrial and behavioural economists have developed theories that explain the conditions under which these practices are profitable for firms, and their implications for consumer welfare. We identify a mismatch between the welfare economic principles used in this theoretical work and the normative perspective in which these practices are viewed as unfair. We develop a concept of ‘transactional fairness’, grounded in the normative approach of Sugden's Community of Advantage, that is reflective of public concerns. Transactional fairness is complementary to established criteria of economic efficiency and distributional equity but is based entirely on the relationship between individual buyers and sellers. It establishes clear principles with realistic information requirements that are appropriate for compliance by firms. Regulation based on this approach can help to restore public faith in markets.

Scholars disagree about the plausibility of preference purification. Some see it as a familiar phenomenon. Others denounce it as conceptually incoherent, postulating that it relies on the psychologically implausible assumption of an inner rational agent. I argue that different notions of rationality can be leveraged to advance the debate: procedural rationality and structural rationality. I explicate how structural rationality, in contrast to procedural rationality, allows us to offer an account of the guiding idea behind preference purification that avoids inner rational agents. Afterward, I address two pressing challenges against preference purification that emerge under the structural rationality account.

Recently several authors have proposed proxies of welfare that equate some (as opposed to all) choices with welfare. In this paper, I first distinguish between two prominent proxies: one based on context-independent choices and the other based on reason-based choices. I then propose an original proxy based on choices that individuals state they would want themselves to repeat at the time of the welfare/policy evaluation (confirmed choices). I articulate three complementary arguments that, I claim, support confirmed choices as a more reliable proxy of welfare than context-independent and reason-based choices. Finally, I discuss the implications of these arguments for nudges and boosts.