Habits, Peers, and Happiness: An Evolutionary Perspective
从演化视角探讨习惯形成和同伴比较如何影响收入与幸福的关系，旨在弥合该领域理论与应用研究之间的鸿沟，对关注幸福决定因素的经济学者有参考价值。
The principal motivating factor in our lives is the pursuit of happiness. In most cultures, when seeking this end, individuals place a high priority on income, and spend much of their waking time procuring this intermediate goal. The connection between income and happiness is by no means trivial, however. Two critical factors come into play. First, beyond subsistence level, the positive effect of a permanent change in income tends to be short lived. We rapidly become accustomed to a more expensive lifestyle. A common name for this feature is habit formation. Second, the satisfaction derived from a given level of income is sharply dependent on how it compares to the income of peers. See, for example, Andrew B. Abel (1990), Becker (1996), and William A. Brock and Steven N. Durlauf (2001) for a demonstration of the influence of habits and peer comparisons over behavior, and see Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein (1999) for a review of the underlying psychology. Habits and peer comparisons mean that an individual is not concerned mainly with her absolute level of income, but rather with the difference between her income and a benchmark that changes over time. In recent years, economists have become increasingly interested in this fact. This interest has been both applied (i.e., the study of habits and peer influences over behavior and the analysis of happiness surveys) and theoretical (i.e., a search for biological foundations). But unlike other more developed areas of economics, these two approaches remain fairly separate from each other. In particular, the existing theoretical work is motivated only by the most basic empirical observations. And the existing applied work, for the most part, has not been influenced by theoretical results. In this essay, we seek to reduce the distance between these two literature strands. In particuHabits, Peers, and Happiness: An Evolutionary Perspective