Working paper N. 773 Gennaio 2018
Ugo Pagano
DEPS,USiena
Massimiliano Vatiero
Università della Svizzera italiana
Abstract
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 produce social costs, we adopt a Law and Economics approach (i) to suggest legal remedies for positional competition, and (ii) to argue that, because legal relations are characterized in turn by positional characteristics, such legal remedies do not represent ‘free lunches’.
Jel Codes
B41, D01, D62, K00
