Correcting for Heterogeneity in the Use of Subjective Scales

This paper supersedes “Adjusting for Scale-Use Heterogeneity in Self-Reported Well-Being” (NBER Working Paper 31728, September 25, 2023) except it analyzes different data. We are grateful to Matt Adler, Angus Deaton, Marc Fleurbaey, Casper Kaiser, Arie Kapteyn, Laura Kubzansky, Richard Lucas, Terra McKinnish, Carolyn Schwartz, Itai Sher, Arthur Stone, Louis Tay, Peter Ubel, Bert Weijters, conference participants at the Bravo Center Workshop on Behavioral Economics at Brown University, the Dartmouth Workshop on Philosophy and Economics, the Hebrew University Federmann Rationality Center’s 31st Annual Retreat, the Innsbruck Winter Summit, the Los Angeles Experiments conference, the Normative Economics and Economic Policy webinar, and seminar participants at UCLA Anderson, Baylor University, Cornell University, Chicago Booth, George Mason, Northwestern Kellogg, Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, Paris School of Economics, Shandong University, Southampton Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, the University of California Santa Barbara, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Connecticut, University of Melbourne, University of Nottingham, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Warwick for helpful comments and discussion; and to Amir Adar, Tal Asif, Keren-Or Barashi Gortler, Yehonatan Caspi, Colby Chambers, Yonathan Cohen, Arshia Hashemi, Dominic Kassirra, Mattar Klein, Tushar Kundu, Dimitriy Leksanov, Rosie Li, Lev Maresca, Josef McCrum, Tuan Nguyen, Jeffrey Ohl, Shenhav Or, Ofri Piltz, Yonatan Rahimi, Becky Royer, Hannah Solheim, Aya Talmon, Pierre-Luc Vautrey, Shira Zadik, and Ruthie Zussman for outstanding research assistance. This work utilized the Summit supercomputer and the Alpine high-performance computing resource at the University of Colorado Boulder and data from the Understanding America Study (UAS), maintained by the Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at the University of Southern California (USC), but does not necessarily represent the official views of USC or UAS. We acknowledge support from NIH/NIA grants R01-AG065364 to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and R01-AG051903 to the University of California Los Angeles for early stages of this research. The authors received IRB approval from the relevant institutions and have no material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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