This paper examines how a firm can strategically choose its capacity to manipulate consumer beliefs about aggregate demand. It looks at a market with social effects where consumers want to do what is popular, to buy what they believe others want to buy. By imposing a capacity constraint and...

This paper examines the structure and evolution of consumption and consumption growth inequality. Once heterogeneous agents relate their neighbors' consumption to their own, consumption volatility and inequality are affected. The relationship predicted between the group average consumption...

I develop a model of conspicuous consumption to empirically measure the importance of peer beliefs to Americans and Chinese. In the model, a consumer cares not only about the direct utility she receives from consumption, but also about the way her consumption pattern affects her peer group's...

This paper investigates whether the consumption of rich households provides a reference point in the consumption choices of non-rich households from an intertemporal perspective. Using UK household data on food consumption, we estimate the Euler equation implied by a life-cycle model...

This paper analyzes optimal product lines when consumers differ both in their taste for quality and in their desire for social image. The market outcome features partial pooling and product differentiation that is not driven by heterogeneous valuations for quality but by image concerns. A...