In the heart of the Great Crisis, amidst great uncertainty and concerns surrounding the future of capitalism, John Maynard Keynes launched his optimistic prophecy that growth and technological change would allow mankind to solve its economic problem within a century. He envisioned a world where...

A nudge is a non-coercive paternalistic intervention that attempts to improve choices by manipulating the framing of a decision problem. As any paternalism, it faces the difficulty of determining the appropriate welfare criterion. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in...

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important...

People not only care about outcomes, they also value the procedures which lead to the outcomes. Procedural utility is a potentially important source of human well-being. This paper aims at introducing the concept of procedural utility into economics, and argues that it should be incorporated...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on reported satisfaction with life it is...

Does individual well-being depend on the absolute level of income and consumption or is it relative to one's aspirations? In a direct empirical test, it is found that higher income aspirations reduce people's utility, ceteris paribus. Individual data on reported satisfaction with life are used...

The experimental literature and studies using survey data have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. Individuals are concerned about social comparisons....

People care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper provides evidence on how the relative income position affects professional sports performances. Our analysis suggests that if a...

In this paper we present a two period model, where the agent's preferences are described by prospect theory as proposed by Kahneman and Tversky. We solve for the agent's portfolio decision. Our findings are that the changes in portfolio weights depend crucially on the reference point and the...

Happiness research in economics takes reported subjective well-being as a proxy measure for utility and has already provided many interesting insights about human well-being and its determinants. We argue that future research on happiness in economics has a lot of potential, but that it needs to...