Essays in applied microeconomics: behaviour and well-being
<p>This thesis explores challenges related to measuring well-being and behaviour, presents novel ways to handle such data and offers some evidence from analysing these types of data which has implications for welfare. Across the three chapters I have two main objectives. Firstly, I present and...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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2021
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| _version_ | 1826281698469347328 |
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| author | Milligan, J Toussaert, S |
| author2 | Crawford, I |
| author_facet | Crawford, I Milligan, J Toussaert, S |
| author_sort | Milligan, J |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>This thesis explores challenges related to measuring well-being and behaviour, presents novel ways to handle such data and offers some evidence from analysing these types of data which has implications for welfare. Across the three chapters I have two main objectives. Firstly, I present and justify methods to handle data on unobservable feelings, such as satisfaction, motivation or pride. Secondly, the research questions are connected through their preoccupations with understanding human welfare.</p>
<p>In Chapter 1, I ask what importance (weightings) do individuals attach to different areas (domains) of life in their overall life satisfaction? In my answer I tackle a fundamental question for economists regarding reported satisfaction data: if we do not wish to assume such data are inter-personally comparable, how can we extract information from them (such as domain weightings)? Existing work uses regression: pooling data across individuals in order to identify average weightings, hence making the inter-personal comparability assumption. I instead use a Maximum Entropy criterion function, which can find a solution for each individual separately: I can identify J domain weightings from a single report of J domain satisfactions and overall satisfaction, and hence find individual-specific weightings.</p>
<p>In Chapter 2, jointly with Séverine Toussaert, we investigate the effectiveness of incentives that emerge from a perceived threat to one's image, triggered by another's assessment: an ego threat. We study this in the context of a road-running race. We ask runners to tell us about their time goal for a race and then tell them we doubt they can achieve their goal, or we offer them a reward (a voucher) if they achieve it, or both, or neither. We find that the ego threat message boosts goal achievement by 12 percentage points, but no effect of the voucher. We look for evidence for the mechanisms through which the message may work, and try to evaluate the welfare effect of the treatment.</p>
<p>In Chapter 3, I present a method to quantify the ordinal differences between two welfare measurement techniques: traditional utility-based Revealed Preference orderings versus Subjective Well-being orderings (from non-incentivized self-reports of well-being). As a proof of concept, I apply the method to an international dataset, and also outline ideal datasets to which this method could be applied for future research on quantifying differences between well-being measures.</p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T00:32:43Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oxford-uuid:805fd265-9d08-4622-98f9-b7c64e7896af |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T00:32:43Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:805fd265-9d08-4622-98f9-b7c64e7896af2022-03-26T21:22:52ZEssays in applied microeconomics: behaviour and well-beingThesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06uuid:805fd265-9d08-4622-98f9-b7c64e7896afWell-beingEconomicsMicroeconomicsEnglishHyrax Deposit2021Milligan, JToussaert, SCrawford, I<p>This thesis explores challenges related to measuring well-being and behaviour, presents novel ways to handle such data and offers some evidence from analysing these types of data which has implications for welfare. Across the three chapters I have two main objectives. Firstly, I present and justify methods to handle data on unobservable feelings, such as satisfaction, motivation or pride. Secondly, the research questions are connected through their preoccupations with understanding human welfare.</p> <p>In Chapter 1, I ask what importance (weightings) do individuals attach to different areas (domains) of life in their overall life satisfaction? In my answer I tackle a fundamental question for economists regarding reported satisfaction data: if we do not wish to assume such data are inter-personally comparable, how can we extract information from them (such as domain weightings)? Existing work uses regression: pooling data across individuals in order to identify average weightings, hence making the inter-personal comparability assumption. I instead use a Maximum Entropy criterion function, which can find a solution for each individual separately: I can identify J domain weightings from a single report of J domain satisfactions and overall satisfaction, and hence find individual-specific weightings.</p> <p>In Chapter 2, jointly with Séverine Toussaert, we investigate the effectiveness of incentives that emerge from a perceived threat to one's image, triggered by another's assessment: an ego threat. We study this in the context of a road-running race. We ask runners to tell us about their time goal for a race and then tell them we doubt they can achieve their goal, or we offer them a reward (a voucher) if they achieve it, or both, or neither. We find that the ego threat message boosts goal achievement by 12 percentage points, but no effect of the voucher. We look for evidence for the mechanisms through which the message may work, and try to evaluate the welfare effect of the treatment.</p> <p>In Chapter 3, I present a method to quantify the ordinal differences between two welfare measurement techniques: traditional utility-based Revealed Preference orderings versus Subjective Well-being orderings (from non-incentivized self-reports of well-being). As a proof of concept, I apply the method to an international dataset, and also outline ideal datasets to which this method could be applied for future research on quantifying differences between well-being measures.</p> |
| spellingShingle | Well-being Economics Microeconomics Milligan, J Toussaert, S Essays in applied microeconomics: behaviour and well-being |
| title | Essays in applied microeconomics: behaviour and well-being |
| title_full | Essays in applied microeconomics: behaviour and well-being |
| title_fullStr | Essays in applied microeconomics: behaviour and well-being |
| title_full_unstemmed | Essays in applied microeconomics: behaviour and well-being |
| title_short | Essays in applied microeconomics: behaviour and well-being |
| title_sort | essays in applied microeconomics behaviour and well being |
| topic | Well-being Economics Microeconomics |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT milliganj essaysinappliedmicroeconomicsbehaviourandwellbeing AT toussaerts essaysinappliedmicroeconomicsbehaviourandwellbeing |