Whether perceived importance can be used as a weighting factor for the aggregation of domain satisfaction is an important issue in the literature on subjective well-being (SWB) measures with multidimensional domains. This paper extends the weighting approach proposed by Benjamin et al. (Am Econ Rev 104:2698–2735, 2014) and uses it to weight domain satisfaction. The weights estimated by this approach can be interpreted as marginal utility, and the weighted average of the domain satisfaction of each individual can be interpreted as the individual’s utility. Using a data set collected from a 2015 survey that we conducted with residents of all Japanese prefectures, we show that this weighted average improves the goodness of fit for overall SWB measures compared with the unweighted averages of domain satisfaction. This finding supports incorporating perceived importance measures into SWB measures. Moreover, we show that, although there are differences in perceived importance among some domains that are less relevant to specific sub-populations, such as work for people above 65 years or relations with family for those who live alone, the relative importance of most domains is similar across the different categories of gender, household income, age, and household composition. Allowing for heterogeneity in the importance weights across these demographic groups provides only negligible improvements to the validity of the domain importance. The approach suggested in this paper can be considered a resident-oriented approach in the sense that the weights are derived from the perceived importance of residents themselves and are thus expected to contribute to resident-oriented policymaking.

感知重要性是否可以用作域满意度聚合的加权因子是多维域主观幸福感 (SWB) 测量文献中的一个重要问题。本文扩展了 Benjamin 等人提出的加权方法。(Am Econ Rev 104:2698–2735, 2014) 并用它来衡量领域满意度。通过这种方法估计的权重可以解释为边际效用，每个人的领域满意度的加权平均值可以解释为个人的效用。使用我们对日本所有县的居民进行的 2015 年调查收集的数据集，我们表明，与领域满意度的未加权平均值相比，该加权平均值提高了整体 SWB 措施的拟合优度。这一发现支持将感知重要性措施纳入 SWB 措施。此外，我们表明，尽管与特定子人群不太相关的某些领域的感知重要性存在差异，例如 65 岁以上人群的工作或独居者的家庭关系，但大多数领域的相对重要性在性别、家庭收入、年龄和家庭构成的不同类别中是相似的。允许跨这些人口群体的重要性权重的异质性对领域重要性的有效性提供的改进微乎其微。