Is more always better?: A survey on positional concerns

How much do others matter? Explaining positional concerns for different goods and personal characteristics

“…Solnick and Hemenway (1998) illustrate that concerns for relative standing are not limited to income only. They include different personal characteristics in their analysis, providing evidence for strong positional concerns regarding a person's attractiveness and intelligence.…”

“…Two of the items included -restaurant visits and cinema visits -are associated with both private consumption and leisure, so that we obtain the additional category private consumption and leisure. While some of the categories included in the present survey were already extensively investigated prior to this study (for income, see, among others, Tversky and Griffin, 1991;Solnick and Hemenway, 1998;Johansson-Stenman et al, 2002;Carlsson and Qin, 2010), research on the other categories is rare (for leisure, see Solnick and Hemenway, 2005;Carlsson et al, 2007), or not existent at all (for savings). Moreover, as already stated above, there is to our knowledge no study analyzing items from more than two or three categories at once in order to compare their degrees of positionality.…”

“…Recent papers have restricted their analysis to two or three different types of items. Comparisons are made, for example, between personal characteristics and income (Solnick and Hemenway, 1998), private and public goods (Solnick and Hemenway, 2005), private consumption and leisure activity (Alpizar et al, 2005), or income, leisure, and private consumption (Carlsson et al, 2007). By introducing two questions regarding private pension schemes and interest-paying investments, we fill the gap with respect to savings.…”

Conspicuous consumption and satisfaction

“…Frank (1999Frank ( , 2004 contents that most people prefer society A. Solnick and Hemenway (1998) have conducted more elaborate discrete choice experiments with real populations. Interestingly, they find that leisure appears to be inconspicuous -perhaps in part because it is not so easily observed by others.…”

Consumption theory with reference dependent utility

“…Solnick and Hemenway (1998), Johansson-Stenman et al (2002), Alpizar et al (2005), and Andersson (2006). This paper presents an extended version of Alessie and Lusardi's (1997) consumption model, in which individuals merely care about their own current and previous consumption.…”