This paper investigates household decisions when individual utility depends on a consumption reference level. The desire to “keep up with the Joneses'' represents one such example. The prior literature shows that, in a Ramsey model, consumption externalities have no impact on steady state...

This paper argues that the conventional definition of the elasticity of complementarity is not well suited to deal with the case of increasing returns. It proposes a slightly different formula, that uses a distance function formulation instead of a production function. The proposed definition...