The Experienced Utility of Well-being and the Deviation Mechanism of Irrational Decision-making

Abstract

From the experienced utility perspective, the subjective well-being includes expected well-being, instant well-being and retrospective well-being. There are extremely important and essential differences among the three forms of experienced utility, which can lead to judgment bias and irrationality. The research project contributes to explore the relationships between experienced utility of well-being and irrational decision making by combining the methods of behavioral science and cognitive neuroscience. The study will be received breakthrough findings by the behavior level, information processing level and neural mechanism level. The research contains three parts: (1)The intrinsic character and behavioral discipline of expected well-being, instant well-being and retrospective well-being; (2)The cognitive mechanisms of bias produced by the three forms of experienced utility. (3)The neural mechanism of the bias induced by experienced utility and irrational decision making. Through a series of studies, we intend to solve three critical issues: (1)In the process of judgment and decision-making, how people are influenced by the expected utility,instant utility and retrospective utility; (2)What is the information processing mechanism and Neural Mechanism of the bias induced by each experienced utility; (3)The discipline of experienced utility bias and inspiration for government public policy. It is not only a contribution to the development of behavior decision theory,but also has much instructive effect on the government administration in order to avoid index pursuing and real-experience sacrificing. It enlightens to solve the problem of Easterlin Paradox.