糖心TV

Self-control failures as judged by themselves (with Liam Delaney)

Behavioral economic insights about systematic decision making biases have obtained considerable influence in policy-making. All over the world, governments use these insights to nudge individuals towards making decisions that make individuals “better off, as judged by themselves”. However, behavioral economics also poses a problem for such policy applications: If choices are biased and do not always reveal individuals’ true preferences, how can policy makers identify what makes individuals better off, as judged by themselves? This question is particularly hard to answer when short-term preferences conflict with long-term preferences. In order to identify whether a policy makes individuals better off, we need a welfare standard to determine what “better off” means and we need a way to measure welfare according to that standard. This paper deals with the latter and discusses whether data from everyday life can be used to evaluate policies assuming that policy makers subscribe to a certain welfare standard (choice, subjective well-being, or rational decision making). We present data from a day reconstruction study in which we tracked self-control problems and subjective well-being of 259 participants over one day. Using this data, we first show that it is possible to identify self-acknowledged self-control failures in everyday life. In a nutshell, if individuals attempt to resist a behavior, but nonetheless enact it, a self-acknowledged self-control failure is present. Secondly, we investigate whether self-acknowledged self-control problems are costly in terms of subjective well-being. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical issues with using everyday data in policy evaluation.