Economics

  2010 MAY 7 - (VerticalNews.com) -- "Rising inequalities and high levels of consumption in many capitalist economies make understanding the relationship between stratification and consumption especially important at the turn of the 21st century. I propose that one way to advance this research is to build on work in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption," researchers in the United States report.

  "This scholarship is often disparaged as positing an overly rational and manipulative consumer actor. I argue instead that the positional consumption literature in the Veblenian tradition offers a more complex view of the consumer actor than typically recognized and in particular allows an important role for habit, routine, and convention in consumer behavior. I identify three major arguments about the influence of habit on positional consumption from work in the Veblenian lineage," wrote R.E. Dwyer and colleagues, Ohio State University ...read more

  2010 MAY 7 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to recent research published in the Journal of Consumer Culture, "This article deals with the rise of prosumer capitalism. Prosumption involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption)."

  "It is maintained that earlier forms of capitalism (producer and consumer capitalism) were themselves characterized by prosumption. Given the recent explosion of user-generated content online, we have reason to see prosumption as increasingly central. In prosumer capitalism, control and exploitation take on a different character than in the other forms of capitalism: there is a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labor and toward offering products at no cost, and the system is marked by a new abundance where scarcity once predominated," wrote G. Ritzer and colleagues, University of Maryland ...read more

  2010 APR 30 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to recent research from London, the United Kingdom, "This paper reviews the (primarily North American and European) literature for signs of the economic significance of suburbs. It has been common to view suburbs as economically inert."

  "Yet as national economies have continued to grow, the bulk of urbanisation and national economic activity has been suburban. If suburbs have been important in quantitative terms to the growth of national economies, it is less clear what if any qualitative contribution suburbs have made to national economies. There is, for example, considerable uncertainty over whether the suburban economy possesses the sorts of agglomeration economies that sustain central cities. Moreover, whilst segments of what have been referred to as the 'creative class' continue to underpin central cities, selective out-migration from cities suggests that yet other segments may be apparent in suburbia and beyond. The inequity of private and social costs and benefits across city-regions is by now quite well appreciated. The fact that 'the nation' is one of the largest net beneficiaries in this inequitable pattern of growth is less appreciated but points to interesting links to be made between the economics literature, on the one hand, and the political economy literature, on the other hand," wrote N.A. Phelps and colleagues ...read more