This paper shows that households with positional concerns and convex status utility use gambling to attempt … Germany, proxying the status orientation of households by their expenditures for conspicuous consumption. Our empirical … results strongly indicate that households who care about status are more likely to participate in gambling and invest more in …

status. While briefly reviewing evidence from different literatures that is consistent with the existence of preferences for … status, we pay special attention to experimental work that attempts to study status directly by inducing it in the lab …