Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximise their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some patterns of decision as suboptimal. We review evidence of suboptimal choices that arise for two reasons. Fir...

We measure the impact of individuals’ looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using four data sets, the Quality of American Life surveys from the 1970s, the British National Child Development Study, and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey, we construct the beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty. Personal beauty raises happiness, wit...

OBJECTIVE Assessing the relationship between happiness and social support networks in Colombia. METHODOLOGY A cross-sectional, observational study was carried out on 7,335 people living in an urban area (Bogotá) and a rural area (Ubaté) who had been stratified by age, economic status and last year of schooling. A questionnaire asked about the people's perception of their current mood and how ...

background : one of the important requirements for cultural, social and even economic development is having a book-loving nation. in order to achieve this, there is a need for purposeful and continuous programming. the purpose of this research was to determine the relationship between students' study habits, happiness and depression in isfahan university of medical science. methods : this resea...

Evidences show that an increase in the level of average income does not necessarily lead to a corresponding increase in the average level of happiness. This phenomenon has been explained by applying theories of relative-consumption and positional goods. This paper suggests an additional explanation. It is argued that due to the nature of technological progress, people increasingly choose to wor...

We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate how individual happiness is affected by unemployment. Unemployment has a large and negative effect even after controlling for individual specific fixed effects. Nonparticipation, in contrast, is much less harmful to happiness. Further, we decompose the total well-being costs of unemployment and find that well above three quarters a...

We test the relationship between happiness and self-rated health in Italy. The analysis relies on a unique dataset collected through the administration of a questionnaire to a representative sample (n = 817) of the population of the Italian Province of Trento in March 2011. Based on probit regressions and instrumental variables estimates, we find that happiness is strongly correlated with perce...

Kazuo Yano, Dr. Eng. Tomoaki Akitomi Koji Ara, Dr. Eng. Junichiro Watanabe, Dr. Eng. Satomi Tsuji Nobuo Sato, Ph.D. Miki Hayakawa Norihiko Moriwaki, Dr. Eng. OVERVIEW: Instead of the industrial production, which drove economic growth in the 20th century, the driver for growth in the 21st century is productivity in knowledge work and service businesses. For this reason, the authors developed a t...

Information on the number of interviewer contacts allows insights into how people’s responses to questions on happiness are connected to the difficulty of reaching potential participants. Using the paradata of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this paper continues such research by revealing a strong link between respondent motivation and reported happiness. Analyses of responses by ...

Much progress has been made in recent years on developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on subjective well-being. In this paper we explore whether this new type of measurement can be fruitfully applied to the study of interdependent utility in general, and altruism between parents and children in particular. We introduce an appropriate econometric methodology a...