The Wellbeing Reading List News: May 2022
View the original WWP Wellbeing Reading List HERE
We asked the World Wellbeing Panel (WWP) panelists to nominate 5 relevant papers in the wellbeing literature that they believed should be added to our Wellbeing Reading List. The nominations are in, and from now until the end of 2022, we will disclose the 24 most-nominated papers.
Papers will be revealed two at a time, starting with those that had the fewest nominations and using the number of citations in 2021 (according to Google Scholar) when there are ties.
The Wellbeing Reading List is managed by WWP panelist Daniela Andrén (Örebro University) and the managing committee of the World Wellbeing Panel.
Please use the hashtag #WellbeingReadingList on social media to share and comment on the papers.
May 2022
Kahneman, D., P. Wakker, and R. Sarin (1997). Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(2), 375-406.
Total google scholar citations: 2764
This paper formalized and argued for two different concepts of utility, namely decision and experienced utility, as introduced by Benthman before the marginal revolution. This made the paper an important milestone for the wellbeing literature in transitioning from a 1980s economic point of view (wherein people are super-rational and thus make decisions based on how they will feel about the outcomes) to a more modern behavioural point of view where it is an empirical question whether people’s decisions are based on ultimate outcome maximisation. It also alerted the field to the question whether we should count as important what people on reflection think about their life or how they experience it in the moment. The paper also argues for the measurability, with direct questions, of utility. This paper has therefore been very central to the life satisfaction literature.
Luttmer, E.F.P. (2005). Neighbors as negatives: relative earnings and wellbeing. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3), 963-1002.
Total google scholar citations: 2757
The two papers of the May reading list were published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, but while the first paper is largely theoretical, this is an empirical paper. This is one of the first papers to examine the importance of relative concerns by means of a life satisfaction question. Using individual data on wellbeing and information about local average earnings, this paper finds that individuals report lower levels of wellbeing if, everything else constant, their neighbours have higher earnings.
View the BEST/World Wellbeing Panel page HERE.