When they are asked about their satisfaction with respect to various domains (job, financial situation, and so on) individuals give responses which may be misinterpreted because they both report ...their situation and their judgment about it. Although satisfaction is generally correlated with objective characteristics of the individual s situation the correlation may be spurious due to personality traits that are likely to influence expressed satisfaction. We argue that despite their hybrid nature, satisfaction variables may be informative. When they are used jointly with objective data, these variables allow to infer or estimate distributions of other variables, which are unobserved or cannot be easily measured. But this is valid on the condition that we are able to control for personality traits. To show that we take the example of satisfaction with respect to working hours. We rely on a very simple model to prove that preferences about working time may theoretically be inferred from expressed satisfaction provided that we observe the employee s actual working hours. The model allows us to identify the problems posed by the specific nature of satisfaction variables in order to deal with them adequately when empirically estimating the model. We use the 8 waves of the French part of the European Household Panel and estimate the mean value of the employee s preferred working hours. We show that empirical models that ignore the specificity of satisfaction variables, generate strongly biased estimates.
Individual well-being is not driven only by income. For example, unemployment, bad health, or uncomfortable housing conditions are likely to worsen quality of life. Consequently such variables must ...be taken into account in order to measure individual well-being correctly, on the condition that we are able to estimate their respective weights. Roughly speaking, is individual well-being more impacted by being unemployed or by living in tiny spaces? And by how much? We propose here a method for estimating weights of a synthetic index of well-being. The method uses satisfaction variables along with more objective variables describing individual situations, in order to construct indicators which measure average well-being and its evolution as well as distribution of individual well-being over the population. We use data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP 1994-2001). We specify econometric models suited for overcoming the subjective nature of satisfaction variables. We estimate weights for the components of well-being indexes that we then build using individual data from enquêtes Revenus Fiscaux collected by Insee. We discuss the validity of these first results and suggest directions for future research.
34 female clerical workers ranked 10 job characteristics in order of importance for self, importance for same sex, and importance for opposite sex. The 10 job characteristics were taken from F. ...Herzberg, B. Mausner, and B. Snyderman (see 34:3) and represented 5 motivators and 5 hygienes. Results of these rankings were compared with results obtained in 2 similar studies which used college females to rank the same 10 job characteristics. Results of this comparison show a basic difference between the 2 different female groups with the college females ranking motivators significantly higher for self than the female clerical workers. This difference is explained in terms of the college females' greater need for self-actualization and greater anticipation of opportunities for advancement, higher responsibilities, and the other motivators.
This study examines the important and often underestimated role that switching barriers play in the propensity to stay with service providers. Three service types (with different structural ...characteristics) were studied across two diverse cultures—Australia (Western, individualistic culture) and Thailand (Eastern, collectivist culture). Six potential switching barriers are examined: search costs; loss of social bonds; setup costs; functional risk; attractiveness of alternatives; and loss of special treatment benefits. The results from a series of multiple regression analyses show switching costs capture a substantial amount of the explained variance in the dependent variable, propensity to stay with a focal service provider. Furthermore we demonstrate using interaction terms that these switching costs appear to be universal across west–east cultures. However, significant variations were found across industries. Next, using a hierarchical regression procedure, we add a satisfaction variable into each model. The incremental gain in
R
2 is significant in each industry. Nonetheless the significant impact of switching barriers gives rise to the identification of a new type of service loyalty, which we term “captive loyalty.”
