Market growth is driven by product innovation. Beyond functional satiation the marginal utility of product performance and variety decreases. We argue that social comparisons underlying innovation diffusion results in consumer motivations for upward assimilation toward the behavior of better...

We study a series of growth models in which households' preferences display `jealousy' or `external habits': a negative dependence on average consumption. We argue that accounting for consumption externalities in growth models requires consideration of both their static and dynamic effects. In a...