Drawing on literature underpinning brand management in marketing, product life cycles in economics, fads in sociology and aging in biology, this paper argues that brand demise is inevitable and not necessarily caused by managerial incompetence. Rather, this demise is a natural part of a brand's...

Authority for Smith arises ironically from the desire to attain a high station in life. Given that most people fail, they 'free ride': they identify their ego with high-ranking agents, through 'vicarious sympathy'. Vicarious sympathy gives rise to status and, if combined with utility, would...

Symbolic value differs from intrinsic value. This paper focuses on symbolic inputs, which make up the production function, and ignores symbolic products (e.g., status, prestige), which constitute the utility function. Symbolic inputs are occasioned by incomplete information. There are three...

The paper attempts to identify the bone of contention concerning the extension of the neoclassical economic approach to traditional domains of other social sciences. The extension of the optimization hypothesis to the study of crime, status, and ideology - known as »economics imperialism -...

Paul Zak highlights the importance of moral values in market exchange. But how should we think about moral values? This comment highlights two distinctions that are largely ignored in the literature: first, we need to distinguish benevolence (altruism) from justice. Second, we need to...