An important part of the costs of crime are intangible victim costs; that is, the effects on individual well-being. Economists tend to value such costs by asking people what they would be willing to pay to avoid them (either in money terms or by giving up something else of value, like life expectancy). However, psychological research has shown that such preferences are not a very good guide to how various events impact on well-being. Recent developments in the measurement of well-being as it is experienced provide promising alternatives to preference-based methods and we discuss how these methods could be developed further to provide more robust estimates of intangible costs of crime.
BaronJ.AschD.A.FagerlinA.JepsonC.LoewensteinG.RiisJ.StinemanM.G.UbelP.A. (2003). Effect of Assessment Method on the Discrepancy between Judgments of Health Disorders People Have and do not Have: A Web Study. Medical Decision Making, 23, 422–434.
2.
BarsksyA. (2002). Forgetting, Fabricating and Telescoping: the Instability of Medical History. Archives of Internal Medicine, 162, 981–984.
3.
BenthamJ. (1948). An Introduction to the Principle of Morals and Legislation. Blackwell; Oxford. (Originally published in 1789.)
4.
BrazierJ. (2004). Non-monetary Methods for Valuing Health: Quality Adjusted Life Years. Paper presented at First ESRC Seminar on Crime, insecurity, and well-being: an economic approach, Sheffield; UK.
5.
BrickmanP.CoatesD.Janoff-BulmanR. (1978). Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 917–927.
6.
ClarkA.DienerE.GeorgellisY.LucasR.L. (2004). Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: a Test of the Baseline Hypothesis. German Institute for Economic Research, Discussion Paper 317; Berlin.
7.
DarR.ArielyD.FrenkH. (1995). The Effect of Past Injury on Pain Threshold and Tolerance. Pain, 60, 189–93.
8.
De WitG.A.BusschbachJ.De CharroF. (2000). Sensitivity and Perspective in the Valuation of Health Status: Whose Values Count?Health Economics, 9 (2), 109–126.
9.
DienerE.Biswas-DienerR. (2002). Will Money Increase Subjective Well-being? A Literature Review and Guide to Needed Research. Social Indicators Research, 57,119–169.
10.
DolanP. (1997). Modelling Valuations for EuroQol Health States. Medical Care, 11, 1095–1108.
DolanP.NettenA.TsuchiyaA.ShaplandJ. (2005). Developing a Preference-based Measure of Public Security. Paper presented at ESRC-ftmded conference on ‘Crime, insecurity, and well-being: an economic approach’, Sheffield; UK.
13.
DolanP.StalmeierP. (2003). The Validity of Time Trade-off Values in Calculating QALYs: Constant Proportional Trade-off Versus the Proportional Heuristic. Journal of Health Economics, 22, 445–458.
14.
DolanP.WhiteM. (2006). Dynamic Well-being: Connecting what we Anticipate with What we Experience. Social Indicators Research, 75 (2), 303–333.
15.
Ferrer-i-CarbonellA.FijtersP. (2004). How Important is Methodology for the Estimates of the Determinants of Happiness?The Economic Journal, 114, 641–659.
16.
FiorelloC.D.ToblerP.N.SchultzW. (2003). Discrete Coding of Reward Probability and Uncertainty by Dopamine Neurons. Science, 299, 1898–1902.
17.
FisherI. (1918). Is ‘Utility’ the Most Suitable Term for the Concept it is Used to Denote?American Economic Review, 8, 335.
18.
GilbertD.T.WilsonT.D. (2000). Miswanting: Some Problems in the Forecasting of Future Affective States. In Thinking and Feeling: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition (ForgasJ., ed.). Cambridge University Press; Cambridge. PAGE NOS PLEASE.
19.
GilbertD.T.LiebermanM.D.MorewedgeC.WilsonT.D. (2004). The Peculiar Longevity of Things not so Bad. Psychological Science, 15, 14–19.
20.
GrossmanM.WoodW. (1993). Sex Differences in Intensity of Emotional Experience: a Social Role Interpretation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 1010–1022.
21.
JepsonC.LoewensteinG.UbelP.A. (2001). Actual versus Estimated Differences in Quality of Life before and after Renal Transplant. Working Paper, Department of Social and Decision Sciences. Carnegie Mellon University; USA.
22.
KahnemanD. (1997). New Challenges to the Rationality Assumption. Legal Theory, 3, 105–124.
23.
KahnemanD.FredricksonB.L.SchreiberC.A.RedelmeierD.A. (1993). When More Pain is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End. Psychological Science, 4, 401–405.
24.
KahnemanD.KruegerA.B. (2006). Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-being. Journal of Economic Perspectives, in press.
25.
KahnemanD.KruegerA.B.SchkadeD.A.SchwarzN.StoneA.A. (2004). Toward National Well-being Accounts. American Economic Review, 94 (2), 429–434.
26.
KahnemanD.WakkerP.SarinR. (1997). Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, 375–405.
27.
KrupatE. (1974). Context as a Determinant of Perceived Threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29 (6), 731–736.
28.
LangP.J.GreenwaldM.K.BradleyM.M. (1993). Looking at Pictures: Affective, Racial, Visceral, and Behavioral Reactions. Psychophysiology, 30, 261–273.
29.
LoewensteinG.O'DonoghueT.RabinM. (2003). Projection Bias in Predicting Future Utility. Quarterly Journal of Economics, November, 1209–1248.
30.
LoomesG. (2004). Valuing Reductions in the Risk of Being a Victim of Crime: the ‘Willingness to Pay’ Approach to Valuing the ‘Intangible Costs’ of Crime. Paper presented at First ESRC Seminar on Crime, Insecurity, and Well-being: an Economic Approach, Sheffield; UK.
31.
LovibondP.F. (2004). Cognitive Processes in Extinction. Learning and Memory, 11, 495–500.
32.
LucasR.E.ClarkA.E.GeorgellisY.DienerE. (2003). Re-examining Adaptation and the Set Point Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84 (3), 527–539.
33.
LundbergU.FrankenhaeuserM. (1980). Pituitary-adrenal and Sympathetic-adrenal Correlates of Distress and Effort. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 24, 125–130.
34.
MenzelP.DolanP.RichardsonJ.OlsenJ. A. (2002). The Role of Adaptation to Disability and Disease in Health State Valuation: a Preliminary Normative Analysis. Social Science and Medicine, 55, 2149–2158.
35.
ParducciA. (1995). Happiness, Pleasure, and Judgment: The Contextual Theory and its Applications. Erlbaum; Mahwah, NJ.
36.
PetersM.L.SorbiM.J.KruiseD.A.KerssensJ.J.VerhaakP.F.BensingJ.M. (2000). Electronic Diary Assessment of Pain Disability and Psychological Adaptation in Patients Differing in Duration of Pain. Pain, 84, 181–192.
37.
PostulaitD.AdangE. (2000). Response, Shift and Adaptation in Chronically Ill Patients. Medical Decision Making, 20, 186–193.
38.
PowdthaveeN. (2005). Unhappiness and Crime: Evidence from South Africa. Economica, 72, 531–547.
39.
RedelmeierD.KahnemanD. (1996). Patient's Memories of Painful Treatment Medical Treatments: Real Time and Retrospective Evaluations of Two Minimally Invasive Procedures. Pain, 116, 3–8.
40.
SchwarzN.StrackF. (1999). Reports of Subjective Well-being: Judgemental Processes and their Methodological Implications. In Well-being. The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (KahnemanD.DienerE.SchwarzN., eds). Russell Sage Foundation; New York.
41.
ScitovskyT. (1976). The Joyless Economy. Oxford University Press; New York.
42.
ShaplandJ.WillmoreJ.DuffP. (1985). Victims in the Criminal Justice System. Gower; Aldershot.
43.
SieffE.DawesR.LoewensteinG. (1999). Anticipated versus Actual Responses to HIV Test Results. American Journal of Psychology, CXII, 297–311.
44.
SmithA. (1759). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edinburgh.
45.
SprangersM.A.G.SchwartzC.E. (1999). Integrating Response Shift into Health-related Quality of Life Research: a Theoretical Model. Social Science & Medicine, 48 (11), 1507–1515.
46.
StoneA.A.ShiffmanS.S.De VriesM.W. (1999). Ecological Momentary Analysis. In Well-being. The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (KahnemanD.DienerE.SchwarzN., eds). Russell Sage Foundation; New York.
47.
TsuchiyaA.DolanP. (2005). The QALY Model and Individual Preferences: A Systematic Review of the Literature. Medical Decision Making, 25 (4), 460–467.
48.
UbelP.A.LoewensteinG.JepsonC. (2003). Whose Quality of Life? A Commentary Exploring Discrepancies between Health State Evaluations of Patients and the General Public. Quality of Life Research, 12, 599–607.
49.
WarrM. (2000). Fear of Crime in the United States: Avenues for Research and Policy. Measurement and Analysis of Crime and Justice, 4, 451–489.
WeinsteinN.D. (1982). Community Noise Problems: Evidence Against Adaptation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2, 87–97.
52.
WilsonT.D.CenterbarD.B.BrekkeN. (2002). Mental Contamination and the Debiasing Problem. In Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgement (GilovichT.GriffinD.KahnemanD., eds). Cambridge University Press; Cambridge.
53.
WilsonT.D.GilbertD.T. (2003). Affective Forecasting. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 345–411.
54.
WilsonT.D.GilbertD.T. (2005). Making Sense: a Model of Affective Adaptation. Mimeo, University of Virginia.
55.
WilsonT.D.MeyersJ.GilbertD.T. (2003). How Happy was I, Anyway? A Retrospective Impact Bias. Social Cognition, 21, 407–432.
