| By: |
Clemens Hetschko;
Louisa von Reumont;
Ronnie Schöb |
| Abstract: |
How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and
predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use
survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites
people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according to their
individual preferences. 11 broad dimensions aggregate these indicators. Our
experiment shows that people do not provide consistent ratings across
differently labelled dimensions that embed the same indicators. They also do
not adjust the rating of equally named dimensions changing sets of indicators.
These results show that survey-based measures might suffer from strong
embedding effects and, as a result, may fail to measure citizens’ true
preferences for the indicators. |
| Keywords: |
beyond GDP, welfare measurement, survey-based welfare indicators, OECD Better Life Index, embedding effect |
| JEL: |
B41 C43 C83 I31 |
| Date: |
2017 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6419&r=hap |