Law Commons^™

Are People Probabilistically Challenged?, Alex Stein

Michigan Law Review

Daniel Kahneman's recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a must-read for any scholar or policymaker interested in behavioral economics. Behavioral economics is a young, but already well-established, discipline that pervasively affects law and legal theory. Kahneman, a 2002 Nobel Laureate, is the discipline's founding father. His pioneering work with Amos Tversky and others challenges the core economic concept of expected utility, which serves to determine the value of people's prospects. Under mainstream economic theory, the value of a person's prospect equals the prospect's utility upon materialization (U) multiplied by the probability of the prospect materializing (P). When the prospect …

Happiness Surveys And Public Policy: What’S The Use?, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides a comprehensive, critical overview of proposals to use happiness surveys for steering public policy. Happiness or “subjective well-being” surveys ask individuals to rate their present happiness, life-satisfaction, affective state, etc. A massive literature now engages in such surveys or correlates survey responses with individual attributes. And, increasingly, scholars argue for the policy relevance of happiness data: in particular, as a basis for calculating aggregates such as “gross national happiness,” or for calculating monetary equivalents for non-market goods based on coefficients in a happiness equation.

But is individual well-being equivalent to happiness? The happiness literature tends to blur …