Positional Goods and Legal Orderings

People consume because others consume, maintained Veblen in 1899. More recently, theoretical, empirical, and experimental articles have argued that people constantly compare themselves to their environments and care greatly about their relative positions. Given that competition for positions may produce social costs, we adopt a Law and Economics approach (i) to suggest legal remedies for positional competition and (ii) to argue that, because legal relations are characterized in turn by positional characteristics, such legal remedies do not represent “free lunches