Education, Aspirations and Life Satisfaction
提出扩大工作和消费机会虽提升决策效用，但可能降低体验效用，并基于意大利数据发现教育可能对生活满意度产生负面影响，且受性别和年龄调节。
SUMMARY The idea that expanding work and consumption opportunities always increases people's wellbeing is well established in economics but finds no support in psychology. Instead, there is evidence in both economics and psychology that people's life satisfaction depends on how experienced utility compares with expectations of life satisfaction or decision utility . In this paper I suggest that expanding work and consumption opportunities is a good thing for decision utility but may not be so for experienced utility. On this premise, I argue that people may overrate their socioeconomic prospects relative to real life chances and I discuss how systematic frustration over unfulfilled expectations can be connected to people's educational achievement. I test the model's predictions on Italian data and find preliminary support for the idea that education and access to stimulating environments may have a perverse impact on life satisfaction. I also find evidence that the latter effect is mediated by factors such as gender and age. Indeed, the model seeks to go beyond the Italian case and provide more general insights into how age/life satisfaction relationships can be modelled and explained.