Do social status seeking behaviors worsen the tragedy of the commons?

Sébastien Rouillon

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The present paper considers the exploitation of a common-property, nonrenewable resource, by individuals concerned with their social status. Assuming that the social status is reflected by the individuals' relative consumptions, we formalize this motivation by means of a utility function, depending on the individual's actual consumption and on the consumption level he aspires, the latter being related to the consumptions in his reference group. We compare the benchmark cooperative solution with a noncooperative Markov-perfect Nash equilibrium. We confirm, under more general conditions than in the existing literature, that the individuals' concern for social status exacerbates the tragedy of the commons. We finally discuss the policy implications and provide a taxation scheme capable of implementing the cooperative solution as a noncooperative Markov-perfect Nash equilibrium.

Keywords: tragedy; behavior; social (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Dynamic Games and Applications, 2014, 4 (1), pp.73-94. ⟨10.1007/s13235-013-0087-6⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Social Status Seeking Behaviors Worsen the Tragedy of the Commons? (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:journl:hal-01135584

DOI: 10.1007/s13235-013-0087-6

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().