Positional Goods: A Diagrammatic Exposition

Working Paper N. 575
October 2009
Massimiliano Vatiero
Dipartimento di Economia Politica, Università degli Studi di Siena
Abstract:

Positional good shares with public good the non-private characteristic of consumption: for a positional good, given the consumption choice of one party, the other(s) must consume a corresponding negative amount of what the first party chooses to consume. Therefore, we treat positional good in a diagrammatic illustration similar to the Samuelsonian criteria for the public good. The aim of this work is to introduce the implications for this in terms of Pareto efficiency

Keywords:

Positional Good, Externality

JEL classification:

D52, D61, D62