Importance Weighting in Subjective Well-Being Measures: Using Marginal Utilities as Weights for Domain Satisfaction

Akinori Kitsuki () and Shunsuke Managi
Additional contact information
Akinori Kitsuki: Kyushu University

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2023, vol. 24, issue 3, No 10, 1120 pages

Abstract: Abstract Whether perceived importance can be used as a weighting factor for the aggregation of domain satisfaction is an important issue in the literature on subjective well-being (SWB) measures with multidimensional domains. This paper extends the weighting approach proposed by Benjamin et al. (Am Econ Rev 104:2698–2735, 2014) and uses it to weight domain satisfaction. The weights estimated by this approach can be interpreted as marginal utility, and the weighted average of the domain satisfaction of each individual can be interpreted as the individual’s utility. Using a data set collected from a 2015 survey that we conducted with residents of all Japanese prefectures, we show that this weighted average improves the goodness of fit for overall SWB measures compared with the unweighted averages of domain satisfaction. This finding supports incorporating perceived importance measures into SWB measures. Moreover, we show that, although there are differences in perceived importance among some domains that are less relevant to specific sub-populations, such as work for people above 65 years or relations with family for those who live alone, the relative importance of most domains is similar across the different categories of gender, household income, age, and household composition. Allowing for heterogeneity in the importance weights across these demographic groups provides only negligible improvements to the validity of the domain importance. The approach suggested in this paper can be considered a resident-oriented approach in the sense that the weights are derived from the perceived importance of residents themselves and are thus expected to contribute to resident-oriented policymaking.

Keywords: Subjective well-being; Multidimensional well-being index; Domain importance; Domain weighting; Resident-oriented approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10902-023-00636-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jhappi:v:24:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1007_s10902-023-00636-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... fe/journal/10902/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10902-023-00636-4

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Happiness Studies is currently edited by Antonella Delle Fave

More articles in Journal of Happiness Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().