Veblen good

Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own. Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own. Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded. The Veblen effect is one of a family of theoretical anomalies in the general law of demand in microeconomics. Other related effects include: Sometimes, the value of a good increases as the number of buyers or users increases. This is called the bandwagon effect when it depends on the psychology of buying a product because it seems popular; or the network effect, when a large number of buyers or users itself increases the value of a good. For example, as the number of people with telephones or Facebook increased, the value of having a telephone or being on Facebook increased, since the user could reach more people. However, neither of these effects suggests that, at a given level of saturation, raising the price would boost demand. Some of these effects are discussed in a classic article by Harvey Leibenstein (1950). Counter-examples have been called the counter-Veblen effect. The effect on demand depends on the range of other goods available, their prices, and whether they serve as substitutes for the goods in question. The effects are anomalies within demand theory, because the theory normally assumes that preferences are independent of price or the number of units being sold. They are therefore collectively referred to as interaction effects. The interaction effects are a different kind of anomaly from that posed by Giffen goods. The Giffen goods theory is one for which observed quantity demanded rises as price rises, but the effect arises without any interaction between price and preference—it results from the interplay of the income effect and the substitution effect of a change in price. Studies have examined cases of goods which show interaction effects, and in which people seem to receive more pleasure from more expensive goods.