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LIT-1448: Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1105): in full, from the published article as deposited in Erasmus University Rotterdam's repository (RePub, hdl 1765/23011). Distinguishes decision utility (an outcome's weight in choice) from experienced utility (hedonic quality). Experienced utility divides into instant utility, reported in real time, and remembered utility, a retrospective evaluation. Remembered utility follows a Peak-End rule and neglects duration. Choices follow remembered utility, so people choose dominated, longer painful episodes. Axioms on ordinal instant utility with a neutral zero yield total utility as a time integral. Filed for the record's three-layer operationalization of felt valence (CLAIM-440).
Tagsemotion-and-affect, well-being, psychometrics, cognition
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1105 — Kahneman, Wakker and Sarin — Back to Bentham? Explorations of experienced utility

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Daniel Kahneman, Peter P. Wakker & Rakesh Sarin (1997), Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(2):375–405 — DOI-10.1162/003355397555235

Key takeaways

  • Two utilities. ““Decision utility” is the weight of an outcome in a decision. “Experienced utility” is hedonic quality, as in Bentham’s usage” (p. 375). An amnesic patient who is shocked by one of two toasters is indifferent between them. His decision utilities are equal and his experienced utilities are not (p. 376).
  • Instant utility is the measured primitive. It is “a measure of hedonic and affective experience, which can be derived from immediate reports of current subjective experience or from physiological indices” (p. 376). It is bipolar with a “natural zero point” at neutrality (p. 380).
  • Remembered utility follows Peak-End. In film clips, colonoscopies, cold water and loud sounds, global evaluations track the average of peak and end, and duration has “little or no independent effect” (p. 381).
  • Choices follow memory. Most cold-water subjects chose to repeat the Long trial, with 60 s at 14°C plus 30 s of slightly less painful water, over the Short one: 17 of 21 among those whose pain fell, 69% overall (pp. 386–387). The decision was dominated, and “the statement that decisions maximize utility is not a tautology; it can be proved false” (p. 388).
  • Total utility is an integral. Three axioms make total utility the integral of a nondecreasing transform of instant utility: neutral concatenation, monotonicity in instant utility, and monotonicity in total utility, which gives separability. Instant utility need only be ordinal apart from its zero (Theorem 1, pp. 390–391).

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-23 for the record’s plan to measure felt valence in three independent layers (CLAIM-440). Its instant utility is a hedonic marker measured in real time (layer 2). Its decision utility is close to what potential measured from conflicts won would read (layer 1). Its dissociation of the two through remembered utility is a warning about how to measure both. Read in NOTE-1105.

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