A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

Strong growth in disposable income has driven, and is still driving, consumption to unprecedented,but not sustainable levels. To explain the dynamic interplay of needs, need satisfaction, andinnovation underlying that growth a behavioral theory of consumption is suggested and discussedwith...

This paper shows how sustainable consumption patterns can spread within a population viaprocesses of social learning even though a strong individual learning bias may favorenvironmentally harmful products. We present a model depicting how the biased transmission ofdifferent behaviors via...

Until a few generations ago, humans made their living by foraging, like other animals.We have therefore inherited genes that allowed our ancestors to thrive as hunters andgatherers. Thriving in a modern economy requires very different behaviours but wecope because the human brain evolved to be...

The paper contributes to the literature on the relation between structural changes indemand and supply and growth. We develop a macro{economic model with agent{basedmicro{foundations that articulates the links between production and organisational structureson the supply side, and the endogenous...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budgetshares distributions (HBSDs) —defined as the share of household total expenditurespent for purchasing a specific category of commodities— for a large sample of Italianhouseholds in the period 1989-2004....