The Flemish Well-being Monitor: a pilot study

Interpersonal well-being comparisons are essential in the design and evaluation of social and redistributive policies. Recent advances in the literature have argued that well-being is a multidimensional notion and that income is not necessarily a good proxy for it. Measuring well-being therefore requires a richer multidimensional toolbox which in addition to income, includes information about non-monetary dimensions such as health, labor market and educational outcomes. The existing multidimensional well-being measures often rely on an arbitrary weighting scheme and do not respect the preferences of the concerned individuals about the relative importance of the dimensions of life. These comparisons have therefore been criticized for being paternalistic. Measuring well-being in a non-paternalistic way requires an instrument to elicit the preferences of the respondents over the dimensions of well-being. At present, no flexible and operational instrument exists that is sufficiently fine-grained to offer reliable estimates of these preferences. The current project proposes an online survey instrument, the so-called well-being monitor, to fill this gap. The central and innovative core of the well-being monitor uses a choice-based method for preference elicitation that is based on a sequence of adaptive bisectional repeated dichotomous choices. In short, respondents will be offered a sequence of dichotomous choices between life situations. The responses put narrow bounds on the indifference curves of the respondents in an entirely non-parametric way. The project funding will permit us to finance a research assistant to implement the survey in QUALTRICS (a state-of-the art online survey tool) and, most importantly, to implement a pilot version of the well-being monitor with a sample of approximately 800 respondents in Flanders. The results of this project are important from a scientific perspective as they will allow to design the first, entirely non-parametric tool to make well-being comparisons. Moreover, the survey instrument in itself has a large potential societal impact by informing policy makers what people in Flanders value in their life. By doing so, the well-being monitor will allow policy makers to prioritize in a more informed way and to target comprehensive social policies better.

Keywords:MULTIDIMENSIONAL, WELL-BEING

Disciplines:Applied economics, Economic history, Macroeconomics and monetary economics, Microeconomics, Tourism