Preference heterogeneity over the aspects of individual well-being: towards the construction of an applied well-being index

Abstract

Measuring the well-being of individuals is a significant challenge for social scientists, policy makers, and suppliers of social programming, since well-being consists of many dimensions that are difficult to measure, both individually and collectively. Moreover, the relative contribution of each of the various aspects to overall well-being is unknown. We try to answer this challenge using the methodology of Benjamin et al. (Am Econ Rev 104(9):2698–2735, 2014) and using a survey that measures preferences over 27 aspects of individual well-being. We provide estimates of these preferences for a representative sample of the Israeli population. We also document heterogeneity in preferences for respondents with different current levels of well-being and for different demographic groups. For some aspects of well-being, we provide evidence of decreasing marginal utility. For other aspects, we find evidence for what appears to be an increasing marginal utility but we argue that it likely reflects an endogenous determination of the level of well-being. We discuss the policy implications of our findings and how our results could be aggregated to a well-being index that could be used to evaluate and compare the effects of different policy interventions.