Aurora Garcia

This paper reports results from a longitudinal study on the impact of the lockdown on daily self-reported life satisfaction levels during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. A stable panel (N= 1,131) of adult subjects were surveyed during 84 consecutive days (March 29–June 20, 2020). They were asked to report daily life satisfaction and health state levels. Interestingly, daily life satisfaction increased during the lockdown. At the beginning of the experiment, subjects were asked to guess the end-week of the lockdown, against a possible monetary reward for accurate forecasts. Subjects predicting a longer lockdown period reported a higher average level of daily life satisfaction. Females reported on average lower levels of daily life satisfaction, but exhibited a stronger tendency to report higher levels of life satisfaction, the longer their lockdown forecast. Individual heterogeneity in life satisfaction levels can be partly attributed to personality traits, with neuroticism having a negative effect, while extraversion and agreeableness having a positive effect on daily life satisfaction.

In this article, we illustrate experimentally an important consequence of the stochastic component in choice behaviour which has not been acknowledged so far. Namely, its potential to produce ‘regression to the mean’ (RTM) effects. We employ a novel approach to individual choice under risk, based on repeated multiple-lottery choices (i.e. choices among many lotteries), to show how the high degree of stochastic variability present in individual decisions can distort crucially certain results through RTM effects. We demonstrate the point in the context of a social comparison experiment.