Research Assistant Dr. Nur Banu Kartal’s Co-authored Article with Prof. Dr. Alpaslan Akay Published in Social Indicators Research
The article titled “Stick and Stay, Make it Pay? Time Preferences and Marginal (Dis)Utility of Relative Concerns,” co-authored by Nur Banu Kartal, Research Assistant at the Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at the Turkish-German University, and Prof. Dr. Alpaslan Akay, has been published in Social Indicators Research, a Springer Nature journal.
The article examines the relationship between individuals’ time preferences and the marginal utility or disutility generated by relative income comparisons. One of the main findings of the study is that the negative association between others’ income and subjective well-being is more pronounced among impatient individuals. Among more patient individuals, by contrast, the negative association between relative income comparisons and subjective well-being becomes substantially weaker.
Using long-run German Socio-Economic Panel data, the study shows that relative income may operate not only through a status effect, but also, for some groups, through an information effect. In this respect, the article highlights that social comparison is not experienced in the same way by all individuals and that time preferences may play an important role in explaining this heterogeneity.
The study contributes to the literatures on subjective well-being, relative income, patience, and social comparison. It also invites a reconsideration of the Easterlin Paradox from the perspective of time preferences and relative income concerns.
Full-text access: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-026-03852-6
