Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/161858 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 6419
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
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.
Subjects: 
beyond GDP
welfare measurement
survey-based welfare indicators
OECD Better Life Index
embedding effect
JEL: 
B41
C43
C83
I31
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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