IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0255970.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Conspicuous corruption: Evidence at a country level

Author

Listed:
  • Panos Louridas
  • Diomidis Spinellis

Abstract

People can exhibit their status by the consumption of particular goods or experiential purchases; this is known as “conspicuous consumption”; the practice is widespread and explains the market characteristics of a whole class of goods, Veblen goods, demand for which increase in tandem with their price. The value of such positional goods lies in their distribution among the population—the rarer they are, the more desirable they become. At the same time, higher income, often associated with higher status, has been studied in its relation to unethical behavior. Here we present research that shows how a particular Veblen good, illicit behavior, and wealth, combine to produce the display of illegality as a status symbol. We gathered evidence at a large, country-level, scale of a particular form of consumption of an illictly acquired good for status purposes. We show that in Greece, a developed middle-income country, where authorities cannot issue custom vanity license plates, people acquire distinguishing plate numbers that act as vanity plate surrogates. We found that such license plates are more common in cars with bigger engines and in luxury brands, and are therefore associated with higher value vehicles. This cannot be explained under the lawful procedures for allocating license plates and must therefore be the result of illegal activities, such as graft. This suggests a pattern of “conspicuous corruption”, where individuals break the law and use their gains as status symbols, knowing that the symbols hint at rule-breaking, as long as the unlawful practice cannot be incontestably established.

Suggested Citation

  • Panos Louridas & Diomidis Spinellis, 2021. "Conspicuous corruption: Evidence at a country level," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(9), pages 1-14, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0255970
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255970
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0255970
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0255970&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0255970?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Dubois & Derek D. Rucker & Adam D. Galinsky, 2012. "Super Size Me: Product Size as a Signal of Status," Post-Print hal-00681415, HAL.
    2. Benjamin R. Mandel, 2009. "Art as an Investment and Conspicuous Consumption Good," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(4), pages 1653-1663, September.
    3. David Dubois & Derek D. Rucker & Adam D. Galinsky, 2012. "Super Size Me: Product Size as a Signal of Status," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 38(6), pages 1047-1062.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Petr Wawrosz, 2022. "How Corruption Is and Should Be Investigated by Economic Theory," Economies, MDPI, vol. 10(12), pages 1-23, December.
    2. J. Atsu Amegashie, 2024. "The Importance of Social Status in a Rent-Seeking Society," CESifo Working Paper Series 10894, CESifo.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Palma, Marco A. & Ness, Meghan L. & Anderson, David P., 2015. "Buying More than Taste? A Latent Class Analysis of Health and Prestige Determinants of Healthy Food," 2015 Conference (59th), February 10-13, 2015, Rotorua, New Zealand 202566, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.
    2. Koo, Jayoung & Im, Hyunjoo, 2019. "Going up or down? Effects of power deprivation on luxury consumption," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 443-449.
    3. Peggy J. Liu & Kelly L. Haws & Karen Scherr & Joseph P. Redden & James R. Bettman & Gavan J. Fitzsimons, 2019. "The Primacy of “What” over “How Much”: How Type and Quantity Shape Healthiness Perceptions of Food Portions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(7), pages 3353-3381, July.
    4. Zhu, Hong & Zhou, Yayu & Wu, Yening & Wang, Xin, 2022. "To smile or not to smile: The role of facial expression valence on mundane and luxury products premiumness," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    5. Todd Pezzuti & James M. Leonhardt, 2023. "What’s not to like? Negations in brand messages increase consumer engagement," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 51(3), pages 675-694, May.
    6. Hu, Xin & He, Liuyi & Liu, Junjun, 2022. "Status reinforcing: Unintended rating bias on online shopping platforms," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    7. Yu, Yining & Zhou, Xinyue & Wang, Lei & Wang, Qiuzhen, 2022. "Uppercase Premium Effect: The Role of Brand Letter Case in Brand Premiumness," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 98(2), pages 335-355.
    8. Mourali, Mehdi & Yang, Zhiyong & Pons, Frank & Hassay, Derek, 2018. "Consumer power and choice deferral: The role of anticipated regret," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 81-99.
    9. Ahreum Maeng & Pankaj Aggarwal & Vicki MorwitzEditor & Zeynep Gürhan-CanlıAssociate Editor, 2018. "Facing Dominance: Anthropomorphism and the Effect of Product Face Ratio on Consumer Preference," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 44(5), pages 1104-1122.
    10. Na Young Lee & Stephanie M. Noble & Dipayan Biswas, 2018. "Hey big spender! A golden (color) atmospheric effect on tipping behavior," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 46(2), pages 317-337, March.
    11. Sundar, Aparna & Dinsmore, John B. & Paik, Sung-Hee Wendy & Kardes, Frank R., 2017. "Metaphorical communication, self-presentation, and consumer inference in service encounters," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 136-146.
    12. Leiby, Justin, 2018. "The role of consultants and management prestige in management control system adoption," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 1-13.
    13. Panchal, Shirish & Gill, Tripat, 2020. "When size does matter: Dominance versus prestige based status signaling," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 539-550.
    14. Borau, Sylvie & Bonnefon, Jean-François, 2020. "Gendered products act as the extended phenotype of human sexual dimorphism: They increase physical attractiveness and desirability," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 498-508.
    15. Chen, Huan & Pang, Jun & Koo, Minkyung & Patrick, Vanessa M., 2020. "Shape Matters: Package Shape Informs Brand Status Categorization and Brand Choice," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 96(2), pages 266-281.
    16. Machiels, Casparus J.A. & Orth, Ulrich R., 2017. "Verticality in product labels and shelves as a metaphorical cue to quality," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 195-203.
    17. Merdin-Uygur, Ezgi & Ozturkcan, Selcen, 2023. "Consumers and service robots: Power relationships amid COVID-19 pandemic," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    18. Nicolò Bellanca & Stefania Innocenti, 2013. "Resistance to Change in Recent Italy: Some Elements for a Theoretical Framework," Working Papers - Economics wp2013_31.rdf, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa.
    19. Aaron M. Garvey & Simon J. Blanchard & Karen Page Winterich, 2017. "Turning unplanned overpayment into a status signal: how mentioning the price paid repairs satisfaction," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 28(1), pages 71-83, March.
    20. Streletskaya, Nadia A., 2016. "Social Presence and Shopping Behavior: Evidence from Video Data," 2016 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Boston, Massachusetts 236571, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0255970. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.