Conspicuous consumption and social segmentation

This paper develops the idea that conspicuous consumption has an impact on social segmentation, i.e., on the partition of the society into communities. Even though agents do not value conspicuous goods per se, they are competing in a signalling race in order to benefit from social interactions withi...

Full description

Autores:
Tipo de recurso:
Fecha de publicación:
2003
Institución:
Universidad del Rosario
Repositorio:
Repositorio EdocUR - U. Rosario
Idioma:
eng
OAI Identifier:
oai:repository.urosario.edu.co:10336/27419
Acceso en línea:
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9779.00119
https://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/27419
Palabra clave:
Consumer Economics
Theory
Asymmetric and private information
Mechanism design
Social choice
Clubs
Committees
Associations
Economic sociology
Economic anthropology
Language
Social and economic stratification
Rights
License
Restringido (Acceso a grupos específicos)
Description
Summary:This paper develops the idea that conspicuous consumption has an impact on social segmentation, i.e., on the partition of the society into communities. Even though agents do not value conspicuous goods per se, they are competing in a signalling race in order to benefit from social interactions within a community. First, we study the equilibria of this model defining the optimal strategies and the equilibrium partition that characterizes pooling and separating equilibria. In a second step, as conspicuous consumption is a pure waste of money, we study a possible Pareto–improving taxation policy.