Another Avenue for Anatomy of Income Comparisons: Evidence from Hypothetical Choice Experiments

We propose a new avenue in the literature of the relative utility hypothesis, a long which researchers can clearly investigate the changing effects ofincome comparison in a ccordance with different features of reference persons. We test our methodology of hypothetical discrete choice experiment with an original large-scale survey data. We show that the distribution as well as the average intensity of relative utility are different across specific comparison benchmarks, and across types of reference groups people are facing in the experiments. Our results suggest that features and the distribution of true reference groups seriously affect the outcome of empirical investigations of the Easterlin paradox.