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Concept
Positional good
Summary
Positional goods are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there are available in total (as would be the case with other consumer goods). The source of greater worth of positional goods is their desirability as a status symbol, which usually results in them greatly exceeding the value of comparable goods.
Various goods have been described as positional in a given capitalist society, such as gold, real estate, diamonds and luxury goods. Generally any coveted goods, which may be in abundance, that are considered valuable or desirable in order to display or change one's social status when possessed by relatively few in a given community may be described as positional goods. What could be considered a positional good can vary widely depending on cultural or subcultural norms.
More formally in economics, positional goods are a subset of economic goods whose consumption (and subsequent utility), also conditioned by Veblen-like pricing, depends negatively on consumption of those same goods by others. In particular, for these goods the value is at least in part (if not exclusively) a function of its ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to substitutes. The extent to which a good's value depends on such a ranking is referred to as its positionality. The term was coined by Austrian-British financial journalist Fred Hirsch, and the concept has been refined by American economics professor Robert H. Frank and Italian economist Ugo Pagano.
The term is sometimes extended to include services and non-material possessions that may alter one's social status and that are deemed highly desirable when enjoyed by relatively few in a community, such as college degrees, achievements, awards, etc.
Although Thorstein Veblen emphasized the importance of one's relative position in society with reference to the concept of conspicuous leisure and consumption, it was Fred Hirsch who coined the concept of the "positional good", in Social Limits to Growth.
Official source
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