Decisions about how to allocate resources in health care are as much about social value judgements as they are about getting the medical facts right. In this context, it is important to compare the social preferences of members of the general public with those of National Health Service (NHS)...

This paper expands the standard model of utility maximization to endogenize the ubiquitous phenomenon of adaptation. We assume that total utility is an aggregate function of the utility associated with different domains of life, with relative weights that are optimized according to the effort...

We use an experiment (relating to a major European soccer match) to replicate previous studies that show forecasts of the impact of an event on happiness are often greatly exaggerated. In addition, by randomising respondents into one of two groups (assessing happiness before and after the event...

The results from interviews conducted with 51 respondents represent a small contribution to an empirical research agenda designed to find out what goes into wellbeing reports and the appropriateness for policy analysis of what comes out. It appears that life satisfaction ratings are...

Using a longitudinal household panel dataset in the UK, where a significant proportion of the interviews are conducted in September each year, we are able to show that the attacks of September 11 resulted in lower levels of subjective well-being for those interviewed after that date in 2001...

No behavior sits in a vacuum, and one behavior can greatly affect what happens next. We propose a conceptual frame within which a broad range of behavioral spillovers can be accounted for when applying behavioral science to policy challenges. We consider behaviors which take place sequentially...

The aim of The Elgar Companion to Health Economics is to take an audience of advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers to the frontier of research in health economics, by providing them with short and easily readable introductions to key topics. The volume brings together 50...

Commuting is an important component of time use for most working people. We explore the effects of commuting time on the psychological health of men and women. We use data from the British Household Panel Survey in a fixed effects framework that includes variables known to determine...

Time discounting is at the heart of economic decision-making. We disentangle hyperbolic discounting from subjective time perception using experimental data from incentive-compatible tests to measure time preferences, and a set of experimental tasks to measure time perception. The two behavioural...

We conduct a controlled lab-field experiment to directly test the short-run spillover effects of one-off financial incentives in health. We consider how incentives affect effort in a physical activity task – and then how they spillover to subsequent eating behaviour. Compared to a control...