Psychologists and economists take contradictory approaches to research on what psychologists call happiness or subjective well-being, and economists call subjective utility. A direct test of the most widely accepted psychological theory, set-point theory, shows it to be flawed. Results are then given, using the economists' newer "choice approach"--an approach also favored by positive psychologi...

Economic Approaches to Understanding Change in Happiness Are people condemned to an inherent level of experienced happiness? A review of the economic research on subjective well-being gives reason to the assessment that happiness can change. First, empirical findings clearly indicate that people are not indifferent to adverse living conditions when reporting their subjective well-being as obser...

in recent years, economists have paid attention to the relationship between emotions and productivity. economists investigated the bi-directional effect of emotion and subjective well-being, such as happiness, on different economic variables, such as productivity, health, income, and so on. in this paper, we try to study the effect of income on labour force happiness in iran. for this purpose, ...

Happiness is among the concepts which were subject of empirical studies in 1960s. This concept has been used interchangeably with such concepts as joy, satisfaction with life and the like. While meaningfully correlating with the feeling of joy and satisfaction with life, as indicated by numerous researches, the feeling of happiness is affected by different factors and situations. The present re...

The study of individual happiness has enriched economics with many new and sometimes challenging (preliminary) insights.1 More and more often, it is asked about the policy consequences that are to be derived from these insights. We observe that economic research on happiness has an explicit or implicit tendency to follow a “benevolent dictator” approach where the government, and individual poli...

Happiness in the North European is substantially higher than in the South European nations. Only part of that difference can be explained by economic prosperity. This paper explores the effect of social hierarchy. A comparison of contemporary survey findings show that power distance is more pronounced in the South than in the North of Europe. Macrosociological theory is used to provide an histo...