We demonstrate that in models where agents have concerns for status the model predictions can drastically change depending on whether status is modelled as an ordinal or cardinal magnitude. As a proof, we show that two well known theoretical findings are not robust to the substitution of ordinal...

We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for goods to be normal when utility functions are differentiable and strongly quasi-concave. Our condition is equivalent to the condition proposed by Alarie et al. (1990), but it is easier to check: it only requires to compute the minors associated...

Under concerns for relative consumption a PAYG system becomes more attractive because it insures pensioners against the risk of being outperformed, but it becomes potentially less effective in hedging the risks associated with financial markets. The net effect is ambiguous.

If preferences are rational and continuous, then strict convexity implies that the demand correspondence is single-valued (e.g. Barten and Böhm, 1982, lemma 7.3). We show that if, in addition, preferences are strictly monotone then the converse is also true, namely single-valuedness of the...