Three essays in consumption and social dynamics

Abstract

The Ph.D. thesis dissertation, “Three Essays in Consumption and Social Dynamics,” investigates the underlying determinants of consumer behavior and the influences arising from social norms through a rigorous exploration of social behaviour in distinct yet interconnected domains. The work is structured into three essays that together offer a comprehensive analysis of how individual decision rules, market interdependencies, and reference point drives certain economic, and social outcomes. In the first essay, “Interacting Cobweb Demands” (Co-Authored with Prof. Giorgio Ricchiuti) a dynamic two-good, two-market framework is developed to study consumer choice under uncertainty. Building on the classical cobweb model, the analysis introduces a novel heuristic that integrates the conventional price-minimization motive with an expectation-driven evaluation of intrinsic quality—referred to as the Reference Quality (RQ) price. By incorporating variable consumer quotas and exogenous tariffs, the model captures non-linearities in demand and illustrates how market interconnections can precipitate period-doubling and Hopf bifurcations. These results extend canonical models by demonstrating that the relative weighting between price and quality factors critically influences the stability of market equilibria. The second essay, “Misperception of Norms: Smartphone Use,” shifts the focus to digital consumption patterns. Here, the dissertation employs a randomized control trial (RCT) survey—conducted in collaboration with the European Commission’s Joint Research Center—to investigate how misperceptions about peer usage norms drive the overconsumption of digital devices. The findings reveal that individuals tend to overestimate the typical usage of smartphones while underestimating their own, a bias that reinforces excessive screen time. This evidence underscores the role of normative misperceptions in shaping consumption behavior and highlights the potential for informational interventions to realign individual behavior with actual social norms, thereby mitigating welfare losses associated with digital overuse, which is our main finding at this stage. The third essay, “Aspiration and Effort,” considers the persistence of inequality by linking individual aspirations with the broader structure of social networks. Employing both a historical review of seminal perspectives—from Parsons’ functional theory to Veblen’s emphasis on innate competitive drives (i.e. Pecuniary Emulation), and a novel network game model, this chapter argues that aspirations can be determined as an interplay between exogenous endowments but also by the social interactions. By formalizing this in a quadratic-cost pay-off function with effort effort choice, and network interactions, the analysis provides an early stage theoretical exploration on the enduring mechanisms of inequality, suggesting that both intrinsic motivations and extrinsic social influences jointly shape economic outcomes.