People not only obtain utility from actual outcomes but also from the conditions which lead to these outcomes. The paper proposes an economic concept of this notion of procedural utility. Preferences beyond outcome can be manifold. We distinguish procedural utility people get from institutions...

Between sports and happiness. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio- Economic Panel (GSOEP), we find a positive correlation between sports participation and reported life satisfaction. This relationship is stronger at younger and older ages than in middle age, and for people in bad...

Curiously, economists, whose discipline has much to do with human well-being, have shied away from factoring the study of happiness into their work. Happiness, they might say, is an ''unscientific'' concept. This is the first book to establish empirically the link between happiness and...

Happiness research has been a great success by yielding new and important insights. These results are often used in a technocratic manner: governments should maximize, or at least raise, the subjective well-being of the population measured by the national happiness index. Yet the government has...