Benjamin Dan, Cooper Kristen, Heffetz Ori, Kimball Miles
Center for Economic and Social Research and Department of Economics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Economics and Business, Gordon College, Wenham, MA, USA.
Behav Public Policy. 2020 Jul;4(2):198-209. doi: 10.1017/bpp.2019.43. Epub 2020 Jan 23.
We join the call for governments to routinely collect survey-based measures of self-reported wellbeing and for researchers to study them. We list a number of challenges that have to be overcome in order for these measures to eventually achieve a status that is competitive with traditional economic indicators. We discuss in more detail one of the challenges, : single-question wellbeing measures do not seem to fully capture what people care about. We briefly review the existing evidence, suggesting that survey respondents, when asked to make real or hypothetical trade-offs, would not always choose to maximize their predicted response to single-question wellbeing measures. The deviations appear systematic, and they persist under conditions where alternative explanations are less plausible. We also review an approach for combining single-question measures into a more comprehensive wellbeing index - an approach that itself is not free of ongoing theoretical and implementational challenges, but that we view as a promising direction.
我们呼吁各国政府定期收集基于调查的自我报告幸福感指标，并呼吁研究人员对其进行研究。我们列出了一些挑战，要使这些指标最终获得与传统经济指标相媲美的地位，就必须克服这些挑战。我们更详细地讨论其中一个挑战：单一问题幸福感指标似乎无法完全涵盖人们所关心的内容。我们简要回顾了现有证据，这些证据表明，当要求调查受访者进行实际或假设的权衡时，他们并不总是会选择最大化对单一问题幸福感指标的预测回答。这些偏差似乎是系统性的，并且在其他解释不太合理的情况下依然存在。我们还回顾了一种将单一问题指标组合成更全面的幸福感指数的方法——这种方法本身也面临着持续的理论和实施挑战，但我们认为这是一个有前途的方向。
