Keeping up with the Joneses: Examining relative concerns in health related domains

People care about relative position and are willing to engage resources to be above others or at least not below them. Nevertheless, the scarce existing evidence suggests that health is a less positional good: people prefer to be healthy even if others are healthier than them. Unlike previous literature, we use a survey-based study to explore the positionality of several health-related dimensions (e.g., health care reimbursement, cosmetic surgery) in a Choice versus Happiness condition. We find that agents exhibit mainly egalitarian preferences, namely they take into account others' situations but prefer everybody to receive the same amount of health attributes. Moreover, when health attributes are related to physical appearance, agents express significantly higher levels of positional preferences. We draw several policy implications from these egalitarian preferences.

Education as a Positional Good? Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel

People care about their relative standing in society and therefore compare themselves to relevant others. Empirical findings suggest that there are concerns for relative standing for different goods and life domains such as income, cars, attractiveness, and supervisor’s praise. Even education has been mentioned as having a (partially) positional character. However, there has been only small consideration of education as a positional good in the empirical literature so far. Based on the literature on positional concerns and the role of education on relative position, I use German panel data to investigate the relationship between education and life satisfaction beyond the effect education might have through other variables such as income, health, or occupational prestige. Additionally, I consider the possibility that the consumption of education is subject to positional concerns. I discover a positive relationship between education and life satisfaction, indicating that education has a consumption component. Moreover, the relationship depends on the distribution of particular levels of education, suggesting that education has a positional character.

What’s So Good About Education?

Here we consider twin concerns. First, when a good is a purely positional good, and thus of no particular social value, markets are likely to oversupply it. Second, if education is instead a public good, and indeed a critically valuable public good, then markets are likely to undersupply it. To the extent that it is better to have educated neighbors, education is more or less a public good, and in particular, it is not a zero-sum game. It may be positional in a particular narrow context, but even there education is not, and cannot be, merely positional.

Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking

We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it.

Home-ownership as a social norm and positional good: Subjective wellbeing evidence from panel data

Much attention has been devoted to examining the absolute benefits of home-ownership (e.g. security and autonomy). This paper, by contrast, is concerned with conceptualising and testing the relative benefits of home-ownership; those benefits that depend on an individual’s status in society. Home-ownership has previously been analysed as a social norm, implying that the relative benefits (costs) associated with being an owner (renter) are positively related to relevant others’ home-ownership values. The theoretical contribution of this paper is to additionally conceptualise home-ownership as a positional good, implying that the status of both home-owners and renters is negatively related to relevant others’ home-ownership consumption. The empirical contribution of this paper is to quantitatively test for these relative benefits in terms of subjective wellbeing. We run fixed effects regressions on three waves of the British Household Panel Study. We find that (1) a strengthening of relevant others’ home-ownership values is associated with increases (decreases) in the subjective wellbeing of home-owners (renters), and (2) an increase in relevant others’ home-ownership consumption decreases the life satisfaction of owners but has no effect for renters. Overall our findings suggest that (1) the relative benefits of home-ownership are both statistically significant and of a meaningful magnitude, and (2) home-ownership is likely to be both a social norm and a positional good. Without explicitly recognising these relative benefits, policymakers risk overestimating the contribution of home-ownership to societal wellbeing.