The paper presents evidence that validate the focusing illusion. Specifically, the forecasted impact of a basketball championship on students’ subjective well-being was exaggerated because of their intense focus on the event. However, the self-reported states of being for life domains not...

How a full glass is sketched by a person is used as an identification of a maximizer/satisficer-type personality. There is evidence that students who interpret the “full glass” description as, in fact, a glass that is filled up to the brim as the maximizer-types and those who draw their...

This paper presents the first empirical investigation into the effect of e-shopping on subjective well-being. The analysis relies on an Italian nationally and regionally representative dataset from Italy (n = 4,130) drawn from the 2008 wave of the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW)...

The gap between the willingness to accept and willingness to pay is the outcome of incomplete valuation. The problem therefore is more about completing the valuation procedure. The first part of the solution involves two items: one is the inclusion of the direct and indirect income effects and...

Many empirical studies are ambiguous about whether good formal institutions are conducive to subjective well-being or not. Possibly, this ambiguity is caused by cross-section models that do not account for unobserved cultural and institutional effects. Using the World Value Survey 1980-2005,...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

Local weather conditions experienced by survey respondents on the day of the interview are used to assess the size of any bias resulting from transient affective influences on subjective response data and to test the validity of statistical inference about the determinants of subjective well-being.

The formidable economic growth of China in the past few decades led to outstanding improvements in virtually all objective indicators of standards of life. However, these objective records are in striking contrast with subjective ones. Between 1990 and 2007, Chinese average subjective well-being...

This paper studies the effect of fruit and vegetable consumption on human well-being. Using individual-level panel data from a representative sample of Australian households, I estimate the intake of fruit and vegetables to have positive and statistically significant impacts on a wide range of...

A comparison of measures of happiness and life evaluation indicates significant differences in correlates. Life evaluation is less dependent on external circumstances than happiness. Temporary changes in health, labour market status and income have a smaller impact on life evaluation than on...