Relative Consumption Preferences and Public Provision of Private Goods

Tobias König and Tobias Lausen
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Tobias Lausen: Hannover University

No 18, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: This paper shows that the public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals have relative consumption concerns. By providing private goods, governments directly intervene in the consumption structure, and thereby have an instrument to correct for the excessive consumption of positional goods. We identify sufficient conditions when the public provision of private goods is always Pareto-improving, even when (linear) consumption taxes are available. In fact, with the public provision of private goods, there are cases where first-best allocations can be achieved, and a luxury tax on the positional good is redundant.

Keywords: public provision; social preferences; status-seeking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 D63 H42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03-25
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Related works:
Working Paper: Relative consumption preferences and public provision of private goods (2016)
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