In this paper, we challenge the conventional view that pain-and-suffering awards should be interpreted literally as a compensation for feelings of pain and suffering. People adapt to conditions as serious as paraplegia and blindness, returning rapidly to near-normal levels of happiness, which...

The transplant system has been criticized for not paying enough attention to efficiency in distributing scarce organs. But little research has been done to see how the general public views tradeoffs between efficiency and equity. We surveyed members of the general public to see how they would...

Many economists are becoming supportive of 'soft' paternalistic interventions that help people to avoid common decision errors without curtailing individual autonomy. To identify when such interventions could be beneficial, and to assess their success, requires a welfare criterion. However,...

There are a number of substantial problems with using decision-based utility measures such as the time trade off and standard gamble to value improvements in health. Dolan (this issue) argues that because of these problems, it would be better to use measures of real experiences (subjective well...

The current research proposes that people avoid choosing effortful work even when they predict that it will provide them with a better working experience, a phenomenon we call Effort Aversion. In each of the studies, we presented a choice between an effortless but boring job and an effortful but...