Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Making Solution Pluralism In Policy Making Accessible: Optimization Of Design And Services For Constituent Well-Being, Margeret A. Hall, Steven O. Kimbrough, Wibke Michalk, Jefff Schneider, Christof Weinhardt

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Policy makers are increasingly turning to computational support mechanisms for managing uncertainty, and constituent focused-decisions. Utilization and standardization of human-computer interaction principles to create solution pluralism (the condition of having a consideration set containing a multiplicity of credible solutions) is a fundamental to fulfilling this need. There is a need for standardized applications and user interfaces to deliver a higher quality of service, which assists policy makers in maintaining or increasing constituent well-being.

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

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 …