The Fight-or-Flight Response to the Joneses and Income Inequality
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The Department of Economic Science was founded in 1898 to teach economic theory as a truth of industrial life, and was very much concerned with applying economics to business and industry, particularly agriculture. Between 1910 and 1967 it showed the growing influence of other social studies, such as sociology, history, and political science. Today it encompasses the majors of Agricultural Business (preparing for agricultural finance and management), Business Economics, and Economics (for advanced studies in business or economics or for careers in financing, management, insurance, etc).
History
The Department of Economic Science was founded in 1898 under the Division of Industrial Science (later College of Liberal Arts and Sciences); it became co-directed by the Division of Agriculture in 1919. In 1910 it became the Department of Economics and Political Science. In 1913 it became the Department of Applied Economics and Social Science; in 1924 it became the Department of Economics, History, and Sociology; in 1931 it became the Department of Economics and Sociology. In 1967 it became the Department of Economics, and in 2007 it became co-directed by the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Business.
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1898–present
Historical Names
- Department of Economic Science (1898–1910)
- Department of Economics and Political Science (1910-1913)
- Department of Applied Economics and Social Science (1913–1924)
- Department of Economics, History and Sociology (1924–1931)
- Department of Economics and Sociology (1931–1967)
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- College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (parent college)
- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
- College of Business (parent college)
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Abstract
This paper studies the fight-or-flight ambivalence people show
towards the success of the proverbial Joneses. If an agent cares about
leisure and his consumption relative to a benchmark set by the Joneses, his
preferences display the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (KUJ) property if an
increase in the benchmark urges him to substitute away from leisure into
work, allowing him to finance more consumption; the opposite is labeled
running-away-from-the-Joneses (RAJ). The long literature, thus far, finds a)
if any agent's behavior displays KUJ (or RAJ), everyone's will, or b) if an
agent displays KUJ (or RAJ) in one portion of the consumption space, so will
he everywhere. In an otherwise-standard environment with endowment
heterogeneity, we provide conditions under which different agents sharing the
same underlying preferences may endogenously respond very differently to the
Joneses: while some may choose to keep up, others, possibly their close
neighbors, may choose to run away. These choices themselves shape the income
distribution, which in turn, determine the identity and fate of the Joneses.
The analysis is novel because a) such fight-or-flight conflict does not arise
in existing models of consumption externalities, and b) it identifies an
endogenous mechanism that may dampen or amplify market income inequality
arising from innate heterogeneity.