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Status, Inequality and Intertemporal Choice

  • Bianjun Xia
Published/Copyright: October 15, 2010
The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics
From the journal The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics Volume 10 Issue 1

This paper develops an intertemporal model in which individuals care about consumption not only for its own sake, but also for the status it implies. By putting an additive status term into the utility function, I show that the level of inequality in the initial wealth distribution affects individuals’ saving and consumption behavior. The direction of the distortion in intertemporal choice relative to the standard model without a concern for status depends on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in the utility from absolute consumption. In particular, I prove that, for conventional parameter values of the elasticity (e.g. CES parameter larger than one), people save less than what they do without the status concern but the magnitude of this decrease is reduced by the concern for future status. It is also possible that people save more than what they do without the status concern. I also analyze how changes in the initial wealth distribution affect saving. For example, when wealth is Pareto distributed, for a reasonable parameterization, the rich save more and the poor save less when society gets more unequal, which implies that inequality is self-enforcing in this economy. Finally, the resulting allocation is Pareto inefficient due to the externalities generated by the concern for status.

Keywords: status; inequality; intertemporal choice; elasticity of intertemporal substitution
Published Online: 2010-10-15

©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

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  3. Information Revelation in Markets with Pairwise Meetings: Complete Revelation in Dynamic Analysis
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  9. Advice from Multiple Experts: A Comparison of Simultaneous, Sequential, and Hierarchical Communication
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https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1704.1606
Keywords for this article
status; inequality; intertemporal choice; elasticity of intertemporal substitution

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Topics Article
  2. Endogenous Investment and Pricing under Uncertainty
  3. Information Revelation in Markets with Pairwise Meetings: Complete Revelation in Dynamic Analysis
  4. Optimal Screening by Risk-Averse Principals
  5. Coordination under the Shadow of Career Concerns
  6. The Optimal Accuracy Level in Asymmetric Contests
  7. The Fragmentation of Reputation
  8. Sharing Risk Efficiently under Suboptimal Punishments for Defection
  9. Advice from Multiple Experts: A Comparison of Simultaneous, Sequential, and Hierarchical Communication
  10. Contractual Incompleteness for External Risks
  11. On Delegation in Contests and the Survival of Payoff Maximizing Behavior
  12. Optimal Quality Scores in Sponsored Search Auctions: Full Extraction of Advertisers' Surplus
  13. A Theory of Credibility under Commitment
  14. Communication Breakdown: Consultation or Delegation from an Expert with Uncertain Bias
  15. Social Learning in Social Networks
  16. A Note on the Multidimensional Monopolist Problem and Intertemporal Price Discrimination
  17. A Note on Rationalizability and Restrictions on Beliefs
  18. Vote or Shout
  19. Asymmetry and Collusion in Sequential Procurement: A "Large Lot Last" Policy
  20. Status, Inequality and Intertemporal Choice
  21. Designing the Efficient Information-Processing Organization
  22. Ensuring Quality Provision through Capacity Regulation under Price Competition
  23. Successive Oligopolies and Decreasing Returns
  24. Advice by an Informed Intermediary: Can You Trust Your Broker?
  25. Advances Article
  26. Non-Bayesian Learning
  27. Markets versus Negotiations: The Predominance of Centralized Markets
  28. Crime Reporting: Profiling and Neighbourhood Observation
  29. Endogenous Two-Sided Markets with Repeated Transactions
  30. Position Auctions with Budgets: Existence and Uniqueness
  31. Walrasian Equilibrium and Reputation under Imperfect Public Monitoring
  32. Price Regulation under Demand Uncertainty
  33. Linear Demand Systems are Inconsistent with Discrete Choice
  34. Contributions Article
  35. Relative Extinction of Heterogeneous Agents
  36. Profit-Maximizing Sale of a Discrete Public Good via the Subscription Game in Private-Information Environments
  37. Kinked-Demand Equilibria and Weak Duopoly in the Hotelling Model of Horizontal Differentiation
  38. The Role of Replication-Invariance: Two Answers Concerning the Problem of Fair Division When Preferences Are Single-Peaked
  39. Collusive Behavior of Bidders in English Auctions: A Cooperative Game Theoretic Analysis
  40. Bad Government Can Be Good Politics: Political Reputation, Negative Campaigning, and Strategic Shirking
  41. Equilibrium Social Hierarchies: A Non-Cooperative Ordinal Status Game
  42. Bertrand Competition in Markets with Fixed Costs
  43. Regular Infinite Economies
  44. Existence of Competitive Equilibrium in Unbounded Exchange Economies with Satiation: A Note
  45. Quantifying the Cost of Risk in Consumption
  46. On a Class of Contest Success Functions
  47. Revealed Preference with Stochastic Demand Correspondence
  48. Contracting for Dynamic Efficiency
  49. Existence Advertising, Price Competition and Asymmetric Market Structure
  50. Global Social Interactions with Sequential Binary Decisions: The Case of Marriage, Divorce, and Stigma
  51. First-Mover Advantage in a Dynamic Duopoly with Spillover
  52. Costly Renegotiation in Repeated Bertrand Games
  53. Policy and Perspective
  54. Antitrust Evaluation of Horizontal Mergers: An Economic Alternative to Market Definition
  55. Understanding UPP
  56. Upward Pricing Pressure in Horizontal Merger Analysis: Reply to Epstein and Rubinfeld
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