When an individual is asked how satisfied they are with their life overall, they make the following judgements: Which aspects of life are most important to me? How satisfied am I with these? How do these When an individual is asked how satisfied they are with their life overall, they make the following judgements: Which aspects of life are most important to me? How satisfied am I with these? How do these affect my overall satisfaction? These considerations and calculations are heterogeneous and non-public. The final report is routinely used for national happiness indicators, requiring the assumption of inter-personal comparability.
This paper is a work in progress that interrogates these satisfaction reports: I use maximum entropy to estimate, at an individual level, the weightings of a person’s domains of life in their overall life satisfaction reports. I can then ask: how do these weightings estimates help us better understand patterns of changing preferences within individuals over time, and preference differences between households.