Subjective well-being (SWB) data are increasingly used to perform welfare analysis. Interpreted as “experienced utility”, it has recently been compared to “decision utility” using small-scale experiments most often based on stated preferences. We transpose this comparison to the framework of non-experimental and large-scale data commonly used for policy analysis, focusing on the income–leisure domain where redistributive policies operate. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we suggest a “deviation” measure, which is simply the difference between actual working hours and SWB-maximizing hours. We show that about three-quarters of individuals make decisions that are not inconsistent with maximizing their SWB. We discuss the potential channels that explain the lack of optimization when deviations are significantly large. We find proxies for a number of individual and external constraints, and show that constraints alone can explain more than half of the deviations. In our context, deviations partly reflect the inability of the revealed preference approach to account for labor market rigidities, so the actual and SWB-maximizing hours should be used in a complementary manner. The suggested approach based on our deviation metric could help identify labor market frictions.

中文翻译：

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经验与决策效用：收入-休闲偏好的大规模比较*

主观幸福感 (SWB) 数据越来越多地用于进行福利分析。它被解释为“经验效用”，最近被与通常基于既定偏好的小规模实验的“决策效用”进行比较。我们将这种比较转移到常用于政策分析的非实验性和大规模数据的框架，重点关注再分配政策发挥作用的收入-休闲领域。通过英国家庭追踪调查，我们提出了一种“偏差”衡量标准，即实际工作时间与幸福最大化时间之间的差异。我们发现，大约四分之三的人做出的决策与最大化其主观幸福感并不矛盾。我们讨论了当偏差非常大时解释缺乏优化的潜在渠道。我们找到了许多个人和外部约束的代理，并表明仅约束就可以解释一半以上的偏差。在我们的背景下，偏差部分反映了显示性偏好方法无法解释劳动力市场的刚性，因此实际工时和SWB最大化工时应该以互补的方式使用。基于我们的偏差指标的建议方法可以帮助识别劳动力市场摩擦。