Swb Economic Theory And Empirical Research

Subjective Well-Being (SWB) is an interdisciplinary field involving ethics,psychology, sociology and so on. The paper studies SWB under the view ofeconomics, combining with the latest related findings from psychology and behaviorscience. By the main line with the cognitive evaluation, it defines two domains thataffect happiness differently which are conspicuous life-domains and inconspicuouslife-domains, explores the theoretical framework of SWB, develops an empiricalanalysis to test the premise hypotheses and main theoretical propositions using datafrom a large questionnaire survey in China, and also further analyzes the operativemechanism and the influencing factors of SWB for Chinese residents.Drawing utility back to reality from "the palace of rationality" of economics, thepaper explores the neural process of SWB profoundly, and demonstrates that SWB ismore scientific and more accurate for the behavior choice of human in real life thanutility, so it is necessary to develop some expansions and modifications of theeconomic utility theory under the view of happiness.As a significant theoretical discovery, "happiness paradox" exerted a greatinfluence on economics and evoked strong interest of economists. And a lot of famouseconomists threw great efforts into this new area. Because of the great influence of the"happiness paradox" on economics, it should not ignore this paradox in the economichappiness studies. This paper analyzes "happiness paradox" with the game theory,applying the "Prisoner Dilemma" game model to the behavior analysis of comparingcompetition in conspicuous consumption, which preferably reveals the innermechanism of "happiness paradox".The Most prominent feature in this study is that it assesses welfare by combiningeconomists' and psychologists' techniques, and brings neural psychological laws intothe economic analysis of SWB. It breaks down the undoubted rule of rationalhypothesis in economics, and tries to establish the links among economics,psychology and behavior science, which could describes the real human behaviormore accurately. Setting the psychological law of human beings' cognition as themain line, it depicts three cognitive reasons of the discrepancies between happinessand utility, and divides all factors that affect SWB into conspicuous ones andinconspicuous ones, which lays the foundation for the dichotomy research approachof this paper. The biggest innovation of the paper is that the new demand concepts such as"induced demand", "saturated demand" and "pure demand", are introduced from theconsumers' cognitive psychology, and a marginal happiness function is established onthese concepts, which could be seen as the breakthrough in the economic study ofhappiness, and establishes the basis of SWB economic theory. Using the cross graphof marginal happiness function and marginal utility function, it finds out the happinessloss that can not be realized clearly by most people, but do exist universally in society.Furthermore, the Cognitive Bias Happiness Function (CBHF) is developed to make atheoretical and empirical analysis of the well-being loss caused by the cognitivepsychology biases.In the empirical section, it has made a random sample survey in Chineseresidents to collect the first-hand data for the happiness research. The survey covers31 provinces or autonomous regions and costs nearly half a year. And the logisticregression analysis is executed to the survey data with Spss software effectively. Theempirical results support the propositions of the theoretical study quite well.In conclusion, this paper focuses on cognitive evaluation of SWB withineconomic framework. The mains results are summaried as follows. The happiness lossare caused mostly by induced demand. Conspicuous factors have greater influence onSWB than inconspicuous factors, while inconspicuous factors have greater influenceon CBH than conspicuous factors. These results are supported by empirical researcheffectively.