The legal realist Robert Lee Hale offered a definition of freedom as a zero-sum game: each volitional freedom implies some degree of coercion over other people's freedom and at the same time one's liberty is subject to some degree of control and coercion by others. The objective of our work is...

People consume because others consume, maintained Veblen in 1899. More recently, theoretical, empirical and experimental articles have argued that people constantly compare themselves to their environments and care greatly about their relative positions.Given that competition for positions may...