Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some...

Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some...

To maximize happiness, one could either improve desired external outcomes (e.g., wealth) or optimize the relationship between desired external outcome and happiness without improving the outcome per se. Economics focuses on the first method. The present chapter advocates a science about the...

This research investigates a particular type of preference reversal (PR), existing between joint evaluation, where two stimulus options are evaluated side by side simultaneously, and separate evaluation,where these options are evaluated separately.I first examine how this PR differs from other...

We offer a framework about when and how specifications (e.g., megapixels of a camera and number of air bags in a massage chair) influence consumer preferences and report five studies that test the framework. Studies 1-3 show that even when consumers can directly experience the relevant products...

Satisfaction with a dynamic outcome is positively related to its value, the change in the value, and the rate of change. Proposed in this article is another outcome-satisfaction relation: Satisfaction is positively related to the change in the rate, or quasi-acceleration (QA). We tested this...

Darwin argued that emotional experience should be affected, in part, by feedback from the skeletal musculature. Since Darwin's time, researchers have documented that emotional experience is shaped by both facial and postural feedback. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether emotional...

Most happiness researchers use semantic differential or Likert scales to assess happiness. Such conventionally used scales are susceptible to scale renorming (interpretation of scales differently in different contexts) and can produce a specious relativism effect (e.g., rating a low-income...

A central and still open question in consumer and happiness research is whether happiness depends on absolute or relative levels of wealth and consumption. To address this question the authors go to a finer level than overall happiness and distinguish three types of happiness: happiness from...

In the last two decades, much has been published on the topic of culture and cross-cultural psychology and much on the topic of judgment and decision making (J/DM). However, only a few researchers have examined the intersection of the two areas. In this article, we review this body of research....