Happiness, Flow and the Bottom Line

This paper relates a series of current development in the literature of economics and psychology as they relate to decision making by households and business firms. The first part of the paper reviews recent literature dealing with happiness and subjective wellbeing. In the second part of the paper recent developments in management science that make use of intuition and mental focus are related to firm profitability and improved economic efficiency. Both of these recent developments can provide critical insights into improving the “bottom line” performance of policy makers, managers and society as a whole at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. These ideas are then used to design to and develop a series of policy suggestions that refocus attention on the concept of subjective well being or happiness as opposed to economic utility maximization as well as the role of intuition and the concept of “flow” in the decision making process. of top managers. We can summarize these ideas succinctly by focusing on two sets of variables relating to decision making and decision outcome in a two by two matrix summarized in the Table Table Decision Making and Decision Outcomes Decision Outcomes Objective (to maximize Subjective (to max utility) well-being) Decision Making Objective decision making Formal planning Social goals/collective vision Subjective decision making Intuitive decision making (in business) Personal/informal decisions 1 We wish to thank Yap Chin Fang, Victoria Junior College, Singapore for helpful comments.