STRATEGY AND BUSINESS ECONOMICS


What Do Happiness Data Mean? Teory and Survey Evidence


Journal of the European Economic Association, 21, 6, December 2023


ORI HEFFETZ ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR


Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management


Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Cornell University


LINK TO PAPER LINK TO VIDEO


Co-authors • Ori Heffetz


Associate Professor, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University


• Daniel J. Benjamin, Anderson School of Management, UCLA • Jakina Debnam Guzman, Amherst College • Marc Fleurbaey, Paris School of Economics • Miles Kimball, University of Colorado Boulder


Summary Survey questions about well-being, such as happiness and life satisfaction, are


increasingly used in empirical work in economics and other social sciences. Some applications of such self-reported well-being (SWB) data assume that SWB measures the utility that would be revealed by well-informed, deliberated choices, yet there is little existing evidence to date to assess such assumptions. Many other applications of SWB data make no clear statement about the utility notion being assumed, and for many common applications, the conclusions that can be drawn from the empirical analysis hinge on which assumption is made.


To provide some evidence relevant to a range of assumptions researchers make about SWB data, the authors conduct two surveys where respondents introspect and report on how they construct their own answers to one or more of nine different SWB questions. Teir conclusions are both negative and positive. On one hand, respondents’ reports regarding commonly-used SWB questions don’t neatly fit researchers’ predictions, and given utility notions are not consistent. On the other hand, they find that small variations in question wording have large, predictable effects on respondents’ reports, suggesting that SWB questions could be designed to better address a desired utility no- tion.


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