Bienes visibles, rasgos de personalidad y preferencias por estatus

Identifying positional goods is a crucial issue to pursue empirical studies on consumption motivated by status-seeking behavior. Previous studies have carried out a substantial effort to identify this type of goods through its visibility by third parties. This investigation identifies a list of visible goods for the Uruguayan case based on the survey instrument proposed by Heffetz (2011). At the same time, we explore to what extent the socio-cultural visibility of a set of different goods is associated to socio-economic characteristics, personality traits (approximated through the Big Five Inventory) and preferences for status. This study is based on the fourth wave (2016/17) of Estudio Longitudinal del Bienestar en Uruguay. The results validate the use of the visibility scale for the Uruguayan case. Differences by socioeconomic level and demographic variables were not statistically significant. However,disaggregations by personality traits account for a positive and significant association between scrupulousness and visibility for all the categories of goods considered and for the subset of high visibility goods in the case of openness and neuroticism. After controlling for the four groups of variables previously mentioned, we find that those individuals declaring a higher propensity to compare themselves with others, perceive third parties expenditure on visible goods to a greater extents. Thus,our results are in line with previous findings suggesting that preferences for status and personality traits provide complementary information.