Jacob W Braestrup [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
How well this 'philosophy of envy' is rooted in people seems to me to
be very dependent on culture. In the US people seem to care more about
absolute gains than Europeans (especially Scandinavians, who seem to
focus solely on relative gains).
Fabio Guillermo Rojas wrote:
pretty ignorant. Is it only rank about people who exist, or do potential
people count as well? Is it rank of money, power, or subjective utility?
It doesn't have to be that complicated - how about rank among
some small group? Like businesses trying to maximize
Maybe the real puzzle is under what conditions do people maximize
rank or total stuff. F
It doesn't have to be complicated, but it does have to be specific.
A business trying to maximize market share is pretty specific, though
with multiple product lines and sets of consumers there remains
This week's Economist magazine reported an experiment where subjects
could pay to decrease the income of other subjects in the experiment,
which they did with some frequency, although it didn't increase their
income from the experiment. The article's author suggest that this
was evidence for
The original paper is available at
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/Economics/oswald/FinalJuly13Paris.pdf.
I think there's a major flaw in the experiment. When a subject pays to
decrease the income of another subject, he's deciding to transfer some
resources from himself and the other subject to
- Original Message -
From: Eric M. McDaniel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2002 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: Economics of rank vs. Economics of the most money
Has anyone read the article summarized in The Economist (Are People
Willing
to Pay to Reduce
Concerning Robin's point about the details of the relative coonsumption
models, Steven Landsburg made the same point in a review of one of
Frank's books in The Independent Review
http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/TIR42Landsberg.html
Here are a few excerpts
But
Eric wrote:
Since the amount of
money in the economy here was fixed, paying 2 to 25 cents
to reduce
another person's wealth by one dollar sounds like a pretty good
investment decision to me,
in
effect raising one's own wealth by between 75 and 98 cents. Is this
right?
