Project description
Understand essential preferences, skills and personal attributes
Preferences, skills and personal attributes (PSAs) play a crucial role in shaping life decisions and outcomes. Understanding PSAs is essential for effective public policy and personal fulfilment. However, unobserved PSAs are only partially reflected in observable behaviours. The ERC-funded FELICITAS project aims to develop a decision model that estimates PSAs, accounting for imperfect self-knowledge and endogenous effort. It will propose and assess novel elicitation methodologies, refine PSA estimates and assess the impact of PSAs on key life outcomes. The project will provide causal estimates of heterogeneity in preferences related to important life outcomes, such as longevity, health, family structure and social connectedness, in Europe and the US. Finally, it will explore distortions in time perception in relation to PSAs and outcomes.
Objective
FELICITAS revolutionizes the way we think about preferences, skills, and other latent personal attributes (PSAs), estimates their heterogeneity along with its determinants, and provides policy implications.
PSAs are key drivers of a myriad of decisions which combine to create an individual’s life story. Differences in PSAs, together with constraints and luck, underlie inequalities in outcomes. Knowledge of PSAs is essential for policymakers to design effective public policy. Self-knowledge of PSAs is crucial for individuals to sort into occupations, activities, and relationships which enable them to flourish.
However, unobserved PSAs are only noisily revealed by observed behavior. I develop a decision model which separately identifies noise due to imperfect self-knowledge and endogenous effort. I quantify their respective roles in different choice settings, de-bias estimates of PSAs, and assess their importance in essential life outcomes.
I use these insights, along with an innovative discrete choice framework in which respondents choose between pairs of realistic life stories, to provide causal estimates of distributions in preferences (valuations) for policy-relevant life outcomes (longevity, health, family structure) in the United States and in Europe. I link the estimated heterogeneity to culture, demographics, and other PSAs.
Finally, I examine a new latent personal attribute - an individual's propensity to perceive time in a distorted manner. In a twist to received wisdom that time flows faster when one is engaged in a more enjoyable activity, I propose that utility obtained from an activity can be inferred using differences between “felt” and elapsed time. I conjecture that the perceived duration of a task may both be the relevant decision variable, which reflects an individual's exerted effort on a task, and a determinant of required hourly wages. If empirically validated, we obtain a cardinal measure of utility which will transform its measurement.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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53113 Bonn
Germany
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