AKAY, Alpaslan; BARGAIN, Olivier; JARA, H.X.

Bordeaux Sciences Economiques [BSE]

JARA, H.X.

Langue

Document de travail - Pré-publication

Résumé en anglais

Subjective well-being (SWB) data is increasingly used to perform welfare analysis. Interpreted as ‘experienced utility’, it has recently been compared to ‘decision utility’ using smallscale experiments most often based on stated preferences. We transpose this comparison to the framework of non-experimental and large-scale data commonly used for policy analysis, focusing on the income-leisure domain where redistributive policies operate. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we suggest a ‘deviation’ measure, which is simply the difference between actual working hours and SWB-maximizing hours. We show that about three-quarters of individuals make decisions that are not inconsistent with maximizing their SWB. We discuss the potential channels that explain the lack of optimization when deviations are significantly large. We find proxies for a number of individual and external constraints, and show that constraints alone can explain at least half of the deviations. In our context, deviations partly reflect the inability of the revealed preference approach to account for labor market rigidities, so the actual and SWBmaximizing hours should be used in a complementary manner. The suggested approach based on our deviation metric could help identify labor market frictions.< Réduire

Mots clés en anglais

Decision Utility

Experienced Utility

Labor Supply

Subjective Well-Being

URI

https://oskar-bordeaux.fr/handle/20.500.12278/170548

Unités de recherche

Bordeaux Sciences Economiques / Bordeaux School of Economics (BSE) - UMR 6060

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Experienced versus Decision Utility: Large-Scale Comparison for Income-Leisure Preferences

Langue

Résumé en anglais

Mots clés en anglais

URI

Unités de recherche