IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunwpe/0220.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is Concern for Relative Consumption a Function of Relative Consumption?

Author

Listed:
  • Andersson, Fredrik W.

    (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

Abstract

By using hypothetical choice experiments, this paper presents evidence that individuals' concern for relative consumption depends on their relative consumption. Individuals with consumption levels above society's average consumption level tend to have, in general, lower concern for relative consumption. This supports Duesenberry's (1949) notion that people are more concerned with upward social comparison than with downward social comparison.

Suggested Citation

  • Andersson, Fredrik W., 2006. "Is Concern for Relative Consumption a Function of Relative Consumption?," Working Papers in Economics 220, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0220
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/2691
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stutzer, Alois, 2004. "The role of income aspirations in individual happiness," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 54(1), pages 89-109, May.
    2. Bruno S. Frey, 2018. "Economics of Happiness," SpringerBriefs in Economics, Springer, number 978-3-319-75807-7, June.
    3. Markus Knell, 1999. "Social Comparisons, Inequality, and Growth," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 155(4), pages 664-664, December.
    4. Alpizar, Francisco & Carlsson, Fredrik & Johansson-Stenman, Olof, 2005. "How much do we care about absolute versus relative income and consumption?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 56(3), pages 405-421, March.
    5. Armin Falk & Markus Knell, 2004. "Choosing the Joneses: Endogenous Goals and Reference Standards," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 106(3), pages 417-435, October.
    6. Ferrer-i-Carbonell, Ada, 2005. "Income and well-being: an empirical analysis of the comparison income effect," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(5-6), pages 997-1019, June.
    7. Frey, Bruno S & Stutzer, Alois, 2000. "Happiness, Economy and Institutions," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 110(466), pages 918-938, October.
    8. Fredrik Carlsson & Olof Johansson‐Stenman & Peter Martinsson, 2007. "Do You Enjoy Having More than Others? Survey Evidence of Positional Goods," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 74(296), pages 586-598, November.
    9. Fredrik Carlsson & Pham Khanh Nam & Martin Linde-Rahr & Peter Martinsson, 2007. "Are Vietnamese farmers concerned with their relative position in society?," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(7), pages 1177-1188.
    10. Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell & Paul Frijters, 2004. "How Important is Methodology for the estimates of the determinants of Happiness?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 114(497), pages 641-659, July.
    11. 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.
    12. 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.
    13. Olof Johansson-Stenman & Fredrik Carlsson & Dinky Daruvala, 2002. "Measuring Future Grandparents" Preferences for Equality and Relative Standing," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(479), pages 362-383, April.
    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. Andrew E. Clark & Claudia Senik, 2010. "Will GDP growth increase happiness in developing countries?," Working Papers halshs-00564985, HAL.
    2. Carlsson, Fredrik & Qin, Ping, 2008. "It is better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a phoenix: a study of concern for relative standing in rural China," Working Papers in Economics 308, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    3. Carlsson, Fredrik & Qin, Ping, 2010. "It is better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a phoenix: Concern for relative standing in rural China," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 180-186, April.
    4. Andersson, Fredrik W., 2006. "Consumption Theory with Reference Dependent Utility," Working Papers in Economics 226, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.

    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. Andersson, Fredrik W., 2008. "Is concern for relative consumption a function of relative consumption," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 353-364, February.
    2. Alpaslan Akay & Lisa Andersson & Peter Martinsson & Haileselassie Medhin, 2014. "Positional Concerns among the Poor: Does Reference Group Matter? Evidence from Survey Experiments," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 23(5), pages 673-699.
    3. 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.
    4. Tim Friehe & Mario Mechtel, 2017. "Gambling to leapfrog in status?," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 15(4), pages 1291-1319, December.
    5. Akay, Alpaslan & Martinsson, Peter & Medhin, Haileselassie, 2012. "Does Positional Concern Matter in Poor Societies? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Rural Ethiopia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 40(2), pages 428-435.
    6. Alpaslan Akay & Gökhan Karabulut & Peter Martinsson, 2013. "The effect of religiosity and religious festivals on positional concerns -- an experimental investigation of Ramadan," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(27), pages 3914-3921, September.
    7. Hajdu, Tamás & Hajdu, Gábor, 2011. "A hasznosság és a relatív jövedelem kapcsolatának vizsgálata magyar adatok segítségével [Examining the relation of utility and relative income using Hungarian data]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(1), pages 56-73.
    8. Andrew E. Clark & Claudia Senik, 2010. "Will GDP growth increase happiness in developing countries?," PSE Working Papers halshs-00564985, HAL.
    9. 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.
    10. Baumann, Florian & Friehe, Tim, 2015. "Status concerns as a motive for crime?," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 46-55.
    11. Carolina Castilla, 2012. "Subjective well-being and reference-dependence: Insights from Mexico," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 10(2), pages 219-238, June.
    12. Tim Friehe & Mario Mechtel, 2012. "Conspicuous Consumption and Communism: Evidence from East and West Germany," CESifo Working Paper Series 3922, CESifo.
    13. 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.
    14. 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," IEW - Working Papers 369, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich.
    15. Andrew E. Clark & Paul Frijters & Michael A. Shields, 2006. "Income and happiness: Evidence, explanations and economic implications," PSE Working Papers halshs-00590436, HAL.
    16. Akay, Alpaslan & Bargain, Olivier & Zimmermann, Klaus F., 2012. "Relative concerns of rural-to-urban migrants in China," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 421-441.
    17. 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).
    18. Aronsson, Thomas & Johansson-Stenman, Olof, 2008. "Positional Concerns with Multiple Reference Points: Optimal Income Taxation and Public Goods in an OLG Model," Working Papers in Economics 304, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    19. Akay, Alpaslan & Martinsson, Peter, 2012. "Positional Concerns through the Life Cycle: Evidence from Subjective Well-Being Data and Survey Experiments," IZA Discussion Papers 6342, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    20. Akay, Alpaslan & Martinsson, Peter & Medhin, Haileselassie, 2010. "Does Relative Position Matter in Poor Societies? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Rural Ethiopia," RFF Working Paper Series dp-10-05-efd, Resources for the Future.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Relative consumption; marginal degree of positionality; choice experiments; questionnaire-experimental methods;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior

    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:hhs:gunwpe:0220. 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: Jessica Oscarsson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/naiguse.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.