What makes us want to have more than others? Explaining relative consumption effects of public and private goods

Inga Hillesheim and Mario Mechtel

No 4, University of Tübingen Working Papers in Business and Economics from University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Business and Economics

Abstract: We conduct a survey with 264 participants to test for relative consumption effects of national and local public goods as well as private goods. In contrast to previous results, we find that relative consumption effects are more pronounced for private goods than for public goods. Our second finding is that relative consumption effects are less pronounced for local public goods than for national public goods. We discuss and test different explanations for a good's degree of positionality and find that these can, in part, account for our results very well.

Keywords: Relative consumption; Positional goods; Public good spillovers; Non-psychological costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D12 D62 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:tuewef:4

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