This paper deals with the analysis on adventitious utility—that contains many aspects that are connected to the contemporary debate on positional goods—of the early twentieth century American economist, largely forgotten today, George Pendleton Watkins. According to the author, adventitious...

Amartya Sen’s impossibility of a Paretian liberal underscores the trade-off between two widely applied social principles—liberalism and Pareto-optimality: “If someone does have certain liberal values, then he [or she] may have to eschew his [or her] adherence to Pareto optimality” (Sen...

Positional goods and public goods share the characteristic of “publicness” in terms of consumption; i.e., given the consumption of one party, in the case of a positional good, the other must consume a corresponding negative amount of what the first party consumes, while in the case of public...