What Makes us Want to Have more than Others? Explaining Relative Consumumption Effects of Public and Private Goods

Abstract

We conduct a survey with 264 participants to test for relative consumption effects of national and local public goods as well as private goods. In contrast to previous results, we find that relative consumption effects are more pronounced for private goods than for public goods. Our second finding is that relative consumption effects are less pronounced for local public goods than for national public goods. We discuss and test different explanations for a good’s degree of positionality and find that these can, in part, account for our results very well.