Research On Motivation Of Conspicuous Consumption

Since Veblen's "Conspicuous consumption theory" went to public, the research on this phenomenon has never stopped. Scholars there presented the point of view that, agents'consumption decision was not an isolated calculate result by maximizing the utility. However, utility is affected by the comparison with others. Hence, products labeled with a high price which could reflect purchasers'fortune and social statue will be followed by more consumers. These effects were dominated as "Veblen effects", and it has changed the traditional definition of utility formation in which the quantity of products was the only parameter.Nevertheless, we doubt if the "Veblen effects" existed in interpersonal comparison is the only factor accounting for conspicuous consumption. According to the previous research, in a society with rigorous hierarchy where people know very well others'information and personal quality, the function of conspicuous consumption as a personal information signal does not exist, conspicuous consumption is a waste here. But we find many examples to prove that, even in a fixed hierarchy context, conspicuous consumption still prevails. So the motivation of conspicuous consumption is not limited to conspicuous factors.The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that conspicuous consumption has an impact on the partition of the society into communities, and agents can benefit from social interactions within a community---whatever exchanging business opportunities, communicating information and financial aid in emergency. Agents in the communities also use conspicuous consumption to block "free riders". Besides the physical utility and Veblen effects utility brought by conspicuous consumption, I named this third utility as "community utility". Confucian culture in East Asian countries makes Chinese value "losing face" and interpersonal relation a lot, which explains why "community utility" factor can count for many "Conspicuous consumption" actions.This paper will start from the reviewing of the previous literature, then on the basis of analysis I try to establish a model about the motivation of conspicuous consumption which includes the "community utility". Through the depth interview of a group of 10 persons we get some conclusions, and design a questionnaire. And I use SPSS software to do the data analysis, in order to demonstrate the conclusion. The last part of the paper will be the conclusion of questionnaires.