A Test of Conspicuous Consumption: Visibility and Income Elasticities

By Ori Heffetz. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2011

376 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30fc909e9c0bab153eae04708a3ed8fe865c25f8

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Citations in the corpus

Protecting the self through consumption: Status goods as affirmational commodities (2010, methodology): “…into groups of different status (Gerth & Mills, 1946) and consistent with prior studies examining income levels and consumption (Chao & Shor, 1998; Heffetz, 2009), we used the median US household income in 2007 ($50,233, US Census Bureau., 2008), as a meaningful threshold to split the data into…”
Access-Based Services as Substitutes for Material Possessions: The Role of Psychological Ownership (2020, background): “Moreover, conspicuous consumption literature suggests that physical products outperform nonphysical ones in terms of symbolic value (Heffetz 2011; Yang and Mattila 2017).”
Attitudes to Income Inequality: Experimental and Survey Evidence (2014, result): “Of course, comparisons need not be restricted to income and may well refer to comparisons of consumption, as initially suggested by Veblen (1949) and demonstrated empirically by, among others, Bloch et al. (2004), Brown et al. (2011), and Heffetz (2011).”
Debt-driven growth? Wealth, distribution and demand in OECD countries (2016, background): “The latter scenario occurs if housing itself is subject to conspicuous consumption, as found in the literature (Heffetz 2011), and thus could be driven by income inequality.”
Conspicuous conservation: The Prius halo and willingness to pay for environmental bona fides (2014, background): “They rank behind only cigarettes in the survey-based consumption good visibility index of Heffetz (2011).”
Status Goods: Experimental Evidence from Platinum Credit Cards (2017, background): “Heffetz (2011) shows that the income elasticity of demand of consumer goods correlates with reported visibility of the goods to one’s neighbors.”
A wonderful life: experiential consumption and the pursuit of happiness (2015, background): “People grow attached to their possessions as reminders of the occasions when they were purchased (Zauberman, Ratner, & Kim, 2009), as symbols of a time of life when they were most heavily used (Sierra & McQuitty, 2007), and as signals to others of identities they would like to claim (Belk, 1988; Ell”
Neighbors, Knowledge, and Nuggets: Two Natural Field Experiments on the Role of Incentives on Energy Conservation (2013, positive): “Secondly, previous research on the impact of positional goods suggests that energy is one of the least visible goods and therefore people do not necessarily compete on energy (Heffetz, 2011).”