Experienced versus decision utility: large‐scale comparison for income–leisure preferences*
利用英国家庭追踪调查数据，比较实际工作时间与主观幸福感最大化工作时间，发现约四分之三的人的选择与幸福感最大化一致，偏差主要源于劳动市场刚性等约束。
Abstract Subjective well‐being (SWB) data are increasingly used to perform welfare analysis. Interpreted as “experienced utility”, it has recently been compared to “decision utility” using small‐scale experiments most often based on stated preferences. We transpose this comparison to the framework of non‐experimental and large‐scale data commonly used for policy analysis, focusing on the income–leisure domain where redistributive policies operate. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we suggest a “deviation” measure, which is simply the difference between actual working hours and SWB‐maximizing hours. We show that about three‐quarters of individuals make decisions that are not inconsistent with maximizing their SWB. We discuss the potential channels that explain the lack of optimization when deviations are significantly large. We find proxies for a number of individual and external constraints, and show that constraints alone can explain more than half of the deviations. In our context, deviations partly reflect the inability of the revealed preference approach to account for labor market rigidities, so the actual and SWB‐maximizing hours should be used in a complementary manner. The suggested approach based on our deviation metric could help identify labor market frictions.