Preferences for Well-Being and Life Satisfaction

We test whether preferences over different well-being domains significantly correlate with life satisfaction. A sample of respondents is asked to simulate a policymaker decision consisting in allocating hypothetical financial resources among 11 well-being domains. We find that the willingness to invest more in the economic well-being domain is negatively correlated with life satisfaction. We argument that this evidence, while not excluding other rationales, is consistent with the utility misprediction hypothesis suggesting that individuals make systematic errors in estimating the well-being implied from their choices. Subsample estimates document that the less educated are more affected by the problem.