The positionality of goods and the positional concern's origin

Martin Leites, Analía Rivero Borges and Gonzalo Salas

No 23-04, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON

Abstract: We conducted a survey-experimental on a sample of Uruguayan youth to understand what goods are positional, the degree of positional concern, and possible explanations for them. The individual’s degree of positional concern was assessed by asking participants to make a series of choices between hypothetical societies characterized by varying absolute and relative income and consumption levels. We use randomized information treatments to prime participants into competing narratives regarding (i) the goods, (ii) gender, and (iii) sources of inequality in society. The main findings are: (1) the visibility of the goods would not be a necessary condition for their positionality: jewelry, cars, and health insurance are positional goods and; (2) relative income matters; (3) the positional concern is heterogeneous at the individuals level with a bimodal distribution: one group of individuals has a high prevalence of relative concern, while the other is positional-neutral; (4) there are no differences by gender in any case; and (5) individuals are less likely to report positional concerns when differences in income come from effort and inheritance.

Keywords: positional goods; questionnaire-experiments; visibility; meritocracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C91 D63 D64 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-lam
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/39744

Related works:
Journal Article: The positionality of goods and the positional concern’s origin (2024)
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:ulr:wpaper:dt-04-23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lorenza Pérez ().