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Self-reported wellbeing indicators are a valuable complement to traditional economic indicators but are not yet ready to compete with them

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2020

DAN BENJAMIN ,
KRISTEN COOPER ,
ORI HEFFETZ  and
MILES KIMBALL
DAN BENJAMIN
Affiliation:
Center for Economic and Social Research and Department of Economics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, MA, USA
KRISTEN COOPER
Affiliation:
Department of Economics and Business, Gordon College, Wenham, MA, USA
ORI HEFFETZ*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics and Center for Rationality, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel and Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, MA, USA
MILES KIMBALL
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, MA, USA
*
*Correspondence to: Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, 324 Sage Hall, Ithaca, NY14853, USA. Email: oh33@cornell.edu
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Abstract

We join the call for governments to routinely collect survey-based measures of self-reported wellbeing and for researchers to study them. We list a number of challenges that have to be overcome in order for these measures to eventually achieve a status that is competitive with traditional economic indicators. We discuss in more detail one of the challenges, comprehensiveness: single-question wellbeing measures do not seem to fully capture what people care about. We briefly review the existing evidence, suggesting that survey respondents, when asked to make real or hypothetical trade-offs, would not always choose to maximize their predicted response to single-question wellbeing measures. The deviations appear systematic, and they persist under conditions where alternative explanations are less plausible. We also review an approach for combining single-question measures into a more comprehensive wellbeing index – an approach that itself is not free of ongoing theoretical and implementational challenges, but that we view as a promising direction.

Type
Articles
Information
Behavioural Public Policy , Volume 4 , Special Issue 2: On Happiness Being the Goal of Government , July 2020 , pp. 198 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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