Happiness and Consumption

Bruno Frey

Chapter Chapter 9 in Economics of Happiness, 2018, pp 47-49 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Standard economics assumes consumers to be rational actors, but happiness research suggests that consumers tend to mispredict the utility of activities and that they face self-control problems. People often hold incorrect intuitive theories about the determinants of happiness. They overestimate the impact of specific life events on their experienced future well-being with regard to both intensity and duration. There are four major sources for the systematic over- and undervaluation of choice options: the underestimation of adaptation, distorted memory of past experiences, the rationalization of decisions, and false intuitive theories about the sources of future utility.

Keywords: Misprediction; Future utility; Self-control; Overestimation; Underestimation; Adaptation; Distorted memory; Rationalization; Intuitive theories (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spbchp:978-3-319-75807-7_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319758077

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-75807-7_9

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in SpringerBriefs in Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().