Hirsch (1976) suggested that as consumption grows, an increasing proportion of the benefits people derive from consumption is due to a status effect. Status is a relative concept that cannot be increased on average; thus it may seem reasonable to expect that as consumption grows, the marginal benefits of consumption decrease more than the marginal benefits of status. In equilibrium, however, there will be price effects that may more than outweigh this effect. Thus, there is no a priori reason to expect more status-seeking behavior in richer societies.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Research Department of Statistics Norway in its series Discussion Papers with number
239.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)