Listing 1 - 3 of 3 |
Sort by
|
Choose an application
Choose an application
The standard revealed-preference approach to welfare economics encounters fundamental difficulties when the act of choosing directly affects welfare through emotions such as guilt, pride, and anxiety. We address this problem by developing an approach that redefines consumption bundles in terms of the sensations they produce, and measures welfare by blending choice-based methods with self-reported well-being techniques. In applications to classic social preferences paradigms, our approach shows that standard revealed-preference methods, including those that exploit choices over menus, mismeasure welfare because preferences depend on choice sets, while self-reported happiness and satisfaction are not sufficient statistics for welfare.
Choose an application
Validation of happiness measures is inherently challenging because subjective sensations are unobserved. We introduce a novel validation method: subjects report how happy they would feel (or did feel) after some specified event, as well as how they would respond (or would have responded) to a survey question about their happiness after the same event. The difference between these two responses measures "self-reported misreporting." We demonstrate that self-reported misreporting varies across events and is substantial for certain types of events. These findings imply that caution is warranted when interpreting differences in self-reported well-being across contexts.
Listing 1 - 3 of 3 |
Sort by
|