This chapter brings together some of the recent empirical and experimental evidence regarding preferences for social status. While briefly reviewing evidence from different literatures that is consistent with the existence of preferences for status, we pay special attention to experimental work...

In the last decade, a number of experiments have stated that spending money on experiences rather than on material goods tends to make people happier. However, the experimental designs used to analyze the relationship between consumption and subjective well-being had several limitations: small...

This paper proposes a novel approach to explore the relationship between cultural participation and subjective well-being. While most empirical research has considered such a connection using cultural and leisure activities individually or in additive terms, drawing from the sociological...