Abstract:
Economists are trained to infer preferences from observed choices; that is, economists typically watch what people do, rather than listening to what people say. Happiness research departs from this tradition. Instead, happiness researchers have been particularly interested in self-reports of well-being, which may be as simple as an answer to a question with the general form: “Are you very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been asked this kind of question, in many countries and over many years, and as reviewed in Frey and Stutzer (2002), researchers have begun to use these data to tackle a variety of questions.