Misperception of Consumption: Evidence from a Choice Experiment
SeEun Jung (),
Yasuhiro Nakamoto,
Masayuki Sato () and
Katsunori Yamada ()
Additional contact information
Yasuhiro Nakamoto: Kyushu Sangyo University - Kyushu Sangyo University
Katsunori Yamada: ISER - Institute of Social and Economic Research - Osaka University [Osaka]
PSE Working Papers from HAL
Abstract:
We investigate people's different conceptions of the economic term "consumption" when comparing with others. An Internet-based hypothetical discrete choice experiment was conducted with Japanese participants. As in other relative income comparison studies, we found that own consumption and own saving had a positive impact on utility, whereas the consumption and saving of a reference person had a negative impact on utility. However, the results show that the magnitudes of consumption and saving differ in size; saving could affect utility much more than consumption for the Japanese subjects. By using scope tests, we found that the impact of own consumption is not monotonic and so does not necessarily increase utility. This calls into question the conventional assumption of the monotonicity of "the utility of consumption"; consumption could be perceived as a negative good. Our results, therefore, provide some evidence that, in reality, people understand and perceive the economic terms differently from what economists would expect. Furthermore, when considering the consumption of others as well as their own, the size of the discrepancy is even bigger.
Keywords: Relative Utility; Choice Experiment; Misperception of Economic Terms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-dcm, nep-exp, nep-ger and nep-upt
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00965671v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00965671v1/document (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Misperception of Consumption: Evidence from a Choice Experiment (2014) 
Working Paper: Misperception of Consumption: Evidence from a Choice Experiment (2014) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-00965671
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in PSE Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().