Psychologists and sociologists usually interpret answers to happiness surveys as cardinal and comparableacross respondents (Kahneman et al. 1999). As a result, these social scientists run OLS regressionson happiness and changes in happiness. Economists, on the other hand, usually only assume...

This paper contributes to the literature on subjective well-being (SWB) by taking into account different aspects of life, called domains, such as health, financial situation, job, leisure, housing, and environment. We postulate a two-layer model where individual total SWB depends on the...

In this paper we compare the new satisfaction evaluation approach, developed inthe nineties by Oswald ,Clark , Blanchflower and others with the older incomeevaluation (IEQ) approach, developed by Van Praag and Kapteyn in theseventies of the previous century. We find that both approaches yield...

This paper seeks to identify relationships between human capital and cultural capital, in the context of local labour market productivity. The key constituents of human capital, identified in the literature, are jointly examined in a close-to-reality-model. The main advantage of our model of...

Power index research has been a very active field in the last decades. Will this continue or are all the important questions solved? We argue that there are still many opportunities to conduct useful research with and on power indices. Positive and normative questions keep calling for...

Health shocks are among the most important unprotected risks for microfinance clients, but the take-up of micro health insurance typically remains limited. This paper attributes low enrolment rates to a social dilemma. Our theory is that in jointly liable groups, insurance is a public good....

Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a...

A ranking method assigns to every weighted directed graph a (weak) orderingof the nodes. In this paper we axiomatize the ranking method that ranksthe nodes according to their outflow using four independent axioms. This outflowranking method generalizes the ranking by outdegree for directed...

In experimental investigations of the effect of real incentives, accountability—the implicit or explicit expectation of a decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else—is often confounded with the incentives themselves. This confounding of accountability...

This discussion paper led to a chapter in .Voting Power and Procedures: Essays in Honour of Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover', (eds. R. Fara, D. Leech, and M. Salles), pp 41-64, 2014. The main purpose of the present paper is to disentangle the mix-up of the notions of success and satisfaction...