Taking observed preferences seriously You often hear economists (proudly) say that they don't take stated preferences seriously, but instead rely on observed preferences. Correct? 

To me both are problematic if you want to understand preferences, since people often do things they don't want to do. Example: I prefer to go to bed at 22:00 but I observe that I very often get caught up and don't do this.

Decision making of individuals is complicated and I think everyone should be careful interpreting observerd preferences?

My question is: Can anyone provide further points thinking about this issue and/or articles about the interpretability of observed preferences?

I am aware there exists micro-models with "Hyperbolic discounting" making preferences time-inconsistent. I am looking for some more general discussion and frameworks.
In my view, it is useful to distinguish two phenomena:


individuals have time-inconsistent preferences (this fits your example).  There is a huge literature on that. The common practice is to evaluate welfare from the ex ante perspective, thereby assuming that people have well-defined preferences over the long-run, but that their choices might deviate from it because of immediate impulses. In that case, the true preference can be elicited by asking the individual to choose in advance. Some authors question the ex ante perspective, see for instance "The Welfare Economics of Default Options in 401(k) Plans" by Bernheim, Fradkin &amp; Popov.
individuals make mistakes because of cognitive limitations. In this situation, it is very hard (impossible?) to recover the true preferences from the choices. At best, we can have a measure of the extent to which the individual makes consistent decisions. You can have a look for instance at "The Money Pump as a Measure of Revealed Preference Violations" by Echenique, Lee &amp; Shum.


Overall, it is true that economists usually reject stated preferences, and there are many good reasons for that. It does not necessarily imply that we assume that observed choices are perfect; just that we do not have a better alternative to elicit people's preferences. However, some researchers are now studying how we could take advantage of non-choice data: (i) from a neuroscience perspective (many recent papers by Antonio Rangel and Colin Camerer for instance); (ii) using stated preferences, like "Non-Choice Evaluations Predict Behavioral Responses to Changes in Economic Conditions" by Bernheim, Bjorkegren, Naecker &amp; Rangel.