| Summary: | 碩士 === 淡江大學 === 經濟學系碩士班 === 102 === This research is based on the traditional economic model of intertemporal consumption, and investigates an individual’s decision and happiness with the motivation of social comparison. The income distribution and its equality which affect the savings and future income of an individual through the expected feelings of pain and happiness of social comparison thus produce the experience of pain and happiness. Whether the inequality of income distribution makes people painful or happy depends on the factors of social comparison, including the standard of society, the comparison of objects, and the coefficients of attitude, as well as the emphases of different motives and time preference.
The important conclusions are: First, faced with the intertemporal consumption people think about not only the time preference but also others’ attitudes toward themselves in the interpersonal comparison. The optimal decisions of savings can be categorized in the following three types: (1) No savingst (one who is less patient, and enjoys to be in the low social class) (2) Complete savings (one who has more patience, and enjoys to be in the high social class) (3) Partial savings (one’s patience and social position would be contradict when making the decision). Second, the effect of a change in the inequality of income distribution on happiness will vary with the different decisions of savings. For example, in the case of a uniform distribution, other things being equal, if the dispersion of distribution rises, then the number of people within the same interval of savings will decrease. Therefore, the social happiness an individual with complete savings has will decrease as the feelings of being respected reduce. On the contrary, the social happiness an individual with partial savings has will increase as the negative attitude reduces. All in all, if an individual feels the attitude positive in the social comparison, his happiness is negatively correlated with the dispersion of distribution. Conversely, those individuals who feel the attitude more negative, their happiness is positively with the dispersion of distribution .
|
|---|
