IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rdg/emxxdp/em-dp2008-62.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Positional goods... or positional people? Implications for taxation and happiness

Author

Listed:
  • Colin Ash

    (Department of Economics, University of Reading)

  • J. Malcolm Dowling

    (Singapore Management University and University of Hawaii at Manoa)

Abstract

We report the results of surveys on positional concerns for income and leisure. The results confirm earlier evidence that a majority of people are positional regarding income. We also look at the distribution of both these positional concerns among our respondents, something which has not previously been investigated. Our findings point to the need for a more subtle approach than has previously been proposed for using taxation to correct distortions in the income-leisure choice.

Suggested Citation

  • Colin Ash & J. Malcolm Dowling, 2008. "Positional goods... or positional people? Implications for taxation and happiness," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2008-62, Department of Economics, University of Reading.
    • Handle: RePEc:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2008-62
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.henley.reading.ac.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lID=32973&sID=119847
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Oswald, Andrew J., 1983. "Altruism, jealousy and the theory of optimal non-linear taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(1), pages 77-87, February.
    2. Sara J. Solnick & David Hemenway, 2005. "Are Positional Concerns Stronger in Some Domains than in Others?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(2), pages 147-151, May.
    3. J. Solnick, Sara & Hemenway, David, 1998. "Is more always better?: A survey on positional concerns," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 373-383, November.
    4. Veblen, Thorstein, 1899. "The Theory of the Leisure Class," History of Economic Thought Books, McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, number veblen1899.
    5. Richard Zeckhauser (ed.), 1991. "Strategy and Choice," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262240335, December.
    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. Duong, Ngoc T.B. & de Groot, Wouter T., 2018. "Distributional risk in PES: Exploring the concept in the Payment for Environmental Forest Services program, Vietnam," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 22-32.

    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. Aronsson, Thomas & Johansson-Stenman, Olof, 2014. "Positional preferences in time and space: Optimal income taxation with dynamic social comparisons," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 1-23.
    2. Aronsson, Thomas & Johansson-Stenman, Olof, 2014. "Paternalism against Veblen: Optimal Taxation and Non-Respected Preferences for Social Comparisons," Working Papers in Economics 606, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    3. Benno Torgler & Markus Schaffner & Bruno S. Frey & Sascha L. Schmidt, 2008. "Looking Awkward When Winning and Foolish When Losing: Inequity Aversion and Performance in the Field," CREMA Working Paper Series 2008-11, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    4. Benno Torgler & Markus Schaffner & Bruno S. Frey & Sascha L. Schmidt & Uwe Dulleck, 2008. "Inequality Aversion and Performance in and on the Field," CREMA Working Paper Series 2008-18, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    5. Aronsson, Thomas & Johansson-Stenman, Olof, 2013. "Publicly Provided Private Goods and Optimal Taxation when Consumers Have Positional Preferences," Working Papers in Economics 558, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    6. Benno Torgler & Sascha L. Schmidt & Bruno S. Frey, 2006. "The Power of Positional Concerns: A Panel Analysis," CREMA Working Paper Series 2006-19, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    7. Aronsson, Thomas & Johansson-Stenman, Olof, 2009. "Conspicuous Leisure: Optimal Income Taxation when both Relative Consumption and Relative Leisure Matter," Umeå Economic Studies 774, Umeå University, Department of Economics.
    8. Aronsson, Thomas & Johansson-Stenman, Olof & Wendner, Ronald, 2019. "Charity, Status, and Optimal Taxation: Welfarist and Paternalist Approaches," Umeå Economic Studies 959, Umeå University, Department of Economics.
    9. Thomas Aronsson & Olof Johansson-Stenman, 2013. "Veblen’s theory of the leisure class revisited: implications for optimal income taxation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 41(3), pages 551-578, September.
    10. Mujcic, Redzo & Frijters, Paul, 2015. "Conspicuous consumption, conspicuous health, and optimal taxation," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 59-70.
    11. Paul Eckerstorfer, 2014. "Relative Consumption Concerns and the Optimal Tax Mix," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 16(6), pages 936-958, December.
    12. Johansson-Stenman, Olof & Sterner, Thomas, 2015. "Discounting and relative consumption," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 19-33.
    13. Benno Torgler & Sascha L. Schmidt & Bruno S. Frey, 2006. "Relative Income Position And Performance: An Empirical Panel Analysis," IEW - Working Papers 268, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich.
    14. Lampi, Elina & Nordblom, Katarina, 2010. "Money and success - Sibling and birth-order effects on positional concerns," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 131-142, February.
    15. Fischer, Justina A. V. & Torgler, Benno, 2007. "Social Captial and Relative Income Concerns: Evidence from 26 Countries," Berkeley Olin Program in Law & Economics, Working Paper Series qt8sv0k59c, Berkeley Olin Program in Law & Economics.
    16. Donald Bruce & Langchuan Peng, 2018. "Optimal taxation in the presence of income-dependent relative income effects," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 51(2), pages 313-335, August.
    17. Graf, Lorenz & König, Andreas & Enders, Albrecht & Hungenberg, Harald, 2012. "Debiasing competitive irrationality: How managers can be prevented from trading off absolute for relative profit," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 386-403.
    18. Wen-Chun Chang, 2013. "Climbing up the Social Ladders: Identity, Relative Income, and Subjective Well-being," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 113(1), pages 513-535, August.
    19. Bogaerts, Tess & Pandelaere, Mario, 2013. "Less is more: Why some domains are more positional than others," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 225-236.
    20. Solnick, Sara J. & Hong, Li & Hemenway, David, 2007. "Positional goods in the United States and China," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 537-545, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Positional concerns; Relative income; Leisure; Taxation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D0 - Microeconomics - - General
    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2008-62. 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: Alexander Mihailov (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/derdguk.html .

    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.