Related papers: Status substitution and conspicuous consumption
Status signaling drives human behavior and the allocation of scarce resources such as mating opportunities, yet the generative mechanisms governing how specific goods, signals, or behaviors acquire prestige remain a puzzle. Classical…
We study consumption behaviour in systems with heterogeneous interacting agents. Two different models are introduced, respectively with long and short range interactions among agents. At any time step an agent decides whether or not to…
The nexus between debt and inequality has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the wake of the global financial crisis. One prominent candidate to explain the striking co-evolution of income inequality and private debt in this…
We study the consumption behaviour of an asymmetric network of heterogeneous agents in the framework of discrete choice models with stochastic decision rules. We assume that the interactions among agents are uniquely specified by their…
Much research has been conducted on how consumption is related to human relations, for example, consumer communities organized around specific brands, or the way people use products to define their own identity and transmit a desired image.…
Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…
With the rapid increase in the use of social media in the last decade, the conspicuous consumption lifestyle within society has been now transferred to the social media. Along with the changing culture of consumption, the consumer who…
We analyze a coupled anonymized dataset collecting the mobile phone communication and bank transactions history of a large number of individuals. After mapping the social structure and introducing indicators of socioeconomic status,…
This paper presents the results of computational experiments on the effects of social influence on individual and systemic behavior of situated cognitive agents in a product-consumer environment. Paired experiments were performed with…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
Conspicuous consumption occurs when a consumer derives value from a good based on its social meaning as a signal of wealth, taste, and/or community affiliation. Common conspicuous goods include designer footwear, country club memberships,…
We study a dynamic random utility model that allows for consumption dependence. We axiomatically analyze this model and find insights that allow us to distinguish between behavior that arises due to consumption dependence and behavior that…
In this paper, we examine both stability and sustainability of a network-based model of natural resource consumption. Stability is studied from a dynamical systems perspective, though we argue that sustainability is a fundamentally…
To successfully navigate its environment, an agent must construct and maintain representations of the other agents that it encounters. Such representations are useful for many tasks, but they are not without cost. As a result, agents must…
The impact of rising consumption on wealth inequality remains an open question. Here we revisit and extend the Social Architecture of Capitalism agent-based model proposed by Ian Wright, which reproduces stylized facts of wealth and income…
We examine settings in which agents choose behaviors and care about their neighbors' behaviors, but have incomplete information about the network in which they are embedded. We develop a model in which agents use local knowledge of their…
Social identities play an important role in the dynamics of human societies, and it can be argued that some sense of identification with a larger cause or idea plays a critical role in making humans act responsibly. Often social activists…
We pursue an inverse approach to utility theory and consumption & investment problems. Instead of specifying an agent's utility function and deriving her actions, we assume we observe her actions (i.e. her consumption and investment…
Recommender systems help people cope with the problem of information overload. A recently proposed adaptive news recommender model [Medo et al., 2009] is based on epidemic-like spreading of news in a social network. By means of agent-based…
We analyse a coupled dataset collecting the mobile phone communications and bank transactions history of a large number of individuals living in a Latin American country. After mapping the social structure and introducing indicators of…