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TOWARD AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF FASHION
Author(s) -
COELHO PHILIP R. P.,
MCCLURE JAMES E.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
economic inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.823
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1465-7295
pISSN - 0095-2583
DOI - 10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00893.x
Subject(s) - economics , incentive , rank (graph theory) , sociobiology , competition (biology) , microeconomics , invisible hand , neoclassical economics , positive economics , sociology , ecology , mathematics , anthropology , biology , combinatorics
Competition for rank within animal societies is an innate drive recognized in sociobiological and evolutionary theory. In human societies, fashion signals social rank or status. We extend standard economic theories of competitive and noncompetitive markets to analyze fashion by including the status‐seeking incentive. In the competitive case, the conditions under which fashion cycles occur are examined. In the noncompetitive case, producers of fashion services discriminate between customers intertemporally to sustain the fashionability of their services. Unlike the standard models of fashion that populate marketing textbooks, our theory of fashion does not require that demand curves slope upward.