This study is to infer factors directly correlating with subjective well-being on spending money using the causal discovery algorithm.
Three currents of studies have recently emerged on correlations between happiness and spending; ones focused upon income and other social attributes (e.g. Diener and Oishi 2000, Kahneman 2010, Frey and Stuzer 2006); behavioral economics with concepts of mental accounting, risk aversion, experimental consumption and hyperbolic discounting (e.g. Tversky and Kahneman 1992, Thaler 1999, Boven and Gilovich 2003, Kahneman et al on DRM 2004, Ikeda and Kang 2015); and with concepts of prosocial consumptions (e.g. Akin, Dunn and Norton 2011). However there has few contributions to identify direct correlations by eliminating all spurious or indirect correlations.
The authors collected all factors correlating happiness from more than fifty major studies above and conducted survey with 529 Japanese nationals. Then they analyzed the data with the causal discovery algorithm (Isozaki 2014), which is a new methodology applying combined stage algorithm to visualize all correlations among factors as map and to identify casualty of directly correlating factors.
The result showed that only two factors, hyperbolic discounting and gifted experimental consumption directly correlated with subjective well-being measured by Maeno’s 4 factors, PANAS, SHS, and SWLS.