IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/aiccon/2014_137.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

"De gustibus errari (pot)est": utility misprediction, preferences for well-being and life

Author

Listed:
  • Becchetti, Leonardo

    (Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit)

  • Conzo, Pierluigi

    (Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit)

Abstract

The life satisfaction literature generally focuses on how life events affect subjective well-being. Through a contingent valuation survey we test whether well-being preferences have significant impact on life satisfaction. A sample of respondents is asked to simulate a policymaker decision consisting in allocating scarce financial resources among 11 well-being domains. Consistently with the utility misprediction hypothesis, we find that the willingness to invest more in the economic well-being domain is negatively correlated with life satisfaction. Our findings are shown to be robust when we account for unobservables related to economic fragility and non-random sample selection. Reverse causality and omitted variable bias are controlled for with instrumental variables and a sensitivity analysis on departures from exogeneity assumptions. Subsample estimates document that the less educated are more affected by the problem.

Suggested Citation

  • Becchetti, Leonardo & Conzo, Pierluigi, 2014. ""De gustibus errari (pot)est": utility misprediction, preferences for well-being and life," AICCON Working Papers 137-2014, Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:aiccon:2014_137
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.aiccon.it/pubblicazione/136-ibridazione-innovazione-sistemica-percorsi-sviluppo-dellimpresa-sociale-italiana/
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    life satisfaction; well-being preferences; utility misprediction; subjective well-being;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers
    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being

    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:ris:aiccon:2014_137. 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: Paolo Venturi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aiccoea.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.