What Does "Hedonic" Mean in an Economic Context?

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By
Mike Moffatt
Professor of Business, Economics, and Public Policy
  • Ph.D., Business Administration, Richard Ivey School of Business
  • M.A., Economics, University of Rochester
  • B.A., Economics and Political Science, University of Western Ontario
Mike Moffatt, Ph.D., is an economist and professor. He teaches at the Richard Ivey School of Business and serves as a research fellow at the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management.
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Mike Moffatt
Updated March 17, 2017

In an economic context, "hedonic" means of or relating to utility. (In a more general sense, hedonic is related in its etymology to hedonism, which is the search for pleasure.)  A hedonic econometric model is one where the independent variables are related to quality; e.g. the quality of a product that one might buy or the quality of a job one might take.

A hedonic model of wages might correspond to the idea that there are compensating differentials -- that workers would get higher wages for jobs that were more unpleasant.

Terms related to Hedonic:

  • Exponential Utility Function
  • CES Utility
  • Expected Utility

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Moffatt, Mike. "What Does "Hedonic" Mean in an Economic Context?" ThoughtCo, Feb. 16, 2021, thoughtco.com/hedonic-economics-definition-1148011. Moffatt, Mike. (2021, February 16). What Does "Hedonic" Mean in an Economic Context? Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/hedonic-economics-definition-1148011 Moffatt, Mike. "What Does "Hedonic" Mean in an Economic Context?" ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/hedonic-economics-definition-1148011 (accessed October 19, 2021).