The authors investigate the desirability of income taxes when the objective is to mitigate wasteful conspicuous consumption generated by people's status-seeking behavior. They consider the joint role of pre-tax wage inequality and of social norms determining how social status is assigned. They...

In this paper, we analyze the role of intuitive versus deliberative thinking in stag hunt games. To do so we, first, provide a conceptual framework predicting that, under the assumption that stag is the ruling social convention in real life interactions, players who make their choices fast and...

The authors investigate the desirability of income taxes when the objective is to mitigate wasteful conspicuous consumption generated by people's status-seeking behavior. They consider the joint role of pre-tax wage inequality and of social norms determining how social status is assigned. They...

We demonstrate that in models where agents have concerns for status the model predictions can drastically change depending on whether status is modelled as an ordinal or cardinal magnitude. As a proof, we show that two well known theoretical findings are not robust to the substitution of ordinal...

The Prisoner Dilemma is a typical structure of interaction in human societies. In spite of a long tradition dealing with the matter from different perspectives, the emergence of cooperation or defection still remains a controversial argument from both empirical and theoretical point of views. In...

In this paper we study the impact of redistributive policies when agents can signal their relative standing by spending on a conspicuous good. In particular, we analyze how the shape of the status function (i.e. how relative standing is computed and evaluated) may affect the equilibrium outcome...

In this paper we examine the problem of dynamic adverse selection in a stylized market where the quality of goods is a seller’s private information. We show that in equilibrium all goods can be traded if a simple piece of information is made publicly available: the size of the informed side of...

We investigate the effects of introducing a linear labor income tax under the assumptions that individuals have concerns for social status, that they can signal their relative standing by spending on a conspicuous good, and that the tax revenue is redistributed by means of lump sum transfers. We...

If preferences are rational and continuous, then strict convexity implies that the demand correspondence is single-valued (e.g. Barten and B¨ohm, 1982, lemma 7.3). We show that if, in addition, preferences are strictly monotone then the converse is also true, namely single-valuedness of the...