Introducing a 'Different Lives' Approach to the Valuation of Health and Well-Being

Abstract

We introduce a new "different lives" survey format, which asks respondents to rank hypothetical lives described in terms of longevity, health, happiness, income, and other elements of the quality of life. In this short paper, we show that the format is of policy relevance whether a mental state, preference satisfaction or extra-welfarist account of well-being is adopted and discuss some of the advantages the format has over standard formats, such as contingent valuation surveys and QALY-type methods. An exploratory survey indicates that the format is feasible and that health and happiness might be more important than income and life expectancy. (100 words)

Would you choose to be happy? Tradeoffs between happiness and the other dimensions of life in a large population survey

“…Context matters, of course, and it could be that the other elements of wellbeing used in our study are described in ways that made them more desirable relative to how we described SWB. More respondents would prefer to be healthy than to be happy, and this is consistent with the limited related research in this area (Adler and Dolan, 2008;Benjamin et al, 2014a). Health seems to matter in its own right whereas a strong case can be made for all the other elements of wellbeing used in this study as being important only insofar as they make people happy.…”

“…In an exploratory study, Adler and Dolan (2008) ask a small group of respondents in the UK and the US to rank possible lives described in terms of income, life expectancy, health, and SWB (with SWB described specifically as the percentage of time spent in a good mood). All four components have statistically significant coefficients in a rank-ordered logistic estimation, suggesting that aspects beyond SWB matter in the ranking of the lives made by respondents.…”

Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference

“…While we find some differences across demographic-group and political-orientation 5 Broadly speaking, our SP survey can be viewed as an application of conjoint analysis (Green and Rao, 1971). In the context of assessing welfare, our survey design is closely related to the method proposed in Adler and Dolan (2008), who argue that policymakers' weighting of different aspects of well-being should be informed by how survey respondents rank alternative "lives" that vary in the aspects. They illustrate their method with an exploratory study of 72 undergraduate respondents and four aspects: income, health, happiness, and life expectancy.…”

Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference

“…In the context of assessing welfare, our survey design is closely related to the method proposed in Adler and Dolan (2008), who argue that policymakers’ weighting of different aspects of well-being should be informed by how survey respondents rank alternative “lives” that vary in the aspects. They illustrate their method with an exploratory study of 72 undergraduate respondents and four aspects: income, health, happiness, and life expectancy.…”