IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32208.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do People Report Happiness Accurately?

Author

Listed:
  • James Andreoni
  • B. Douglas Bernheim
  • Tingyan Jia

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • James Andreoni & B. Douglas Bernheim & Tingyan Jia, 2024. "Do People Report Happiness Accurately?," NBER Working Papers 32208, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32208
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32208.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32208. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.