At the risk of sounding naive, why would economics change? I've always assumed that intangibles can be goods as well as tangibles. For example, simplicity is a good, hence we use hueristics such as the Availability Hueristic that sometimes (often?) lead to "irrational" decisions, yet make sense in light of the value of rules of thumb in making decisions less difficult.
Could Schadenfreude, status, or spite be goods as well? While my suggestion may border on simplistic, perhaps what is suprising about the study is not that people are willing to pay just to hurt somebody else, but rather how much they are willing to pay. Evidently it's quite a bit. Naively yours, jsh --- fabio guillermo rojas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 people's desire to put others down, > even when they > incur the costs of doing so. > > Question: How would economic theory change if we > assumed that people > would are trying to maximize their relative rank in > a group, or > had a taste for decreasing other's utility? > > Fabio > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games http://sports.yahoo.com
