Positional goods and legal orderings

Ugo Pagano and Massimiliano Vatiero

IdEP Economic Papers from USI Università della Svizzera italiana

Abstract: People consume because others consume, maintained Veblen in 1899. More recently, theoretical, empirical and experimental articles have argued that people constantly compare themselves to their environments and care greatly about their relative positions. Given that competition for positions may produce social costs, we adopt a Law and Economics approach (i) to suggest legal remedies for positional competition, and (ii) to argue that, because legal relations are characterized in turn by positional characteristics, such legal remedies do not represent free lunches.

Keywords: Positional good; Conspicuous consumption; Legal ordering; Legal relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 D01 D62 K00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2018-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-law and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Positional goods and legal orderings (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lug:wpidep:1802

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