Conspicuous Ethics: Existence of Price Dependent Ethical Utility Functions

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to model ethical consumption behaviour based on price-dependent preferences. We motivate ethical consumption founded on the idea that ethical consumers compete for moral superiority relative to their peers by purchasing more expensive ethical conspicuous goods. An ethical consumer model in which consumers display moral consumption choices by purchasing ethical conspicuous goods is developed. This requires de_ning ethical conspicuous goods, social labels, and formalizing a set of assumptions on price-dependent ethical preferences. We show that an ethical utility function exists without relying on the usual transitivity assumption. We utilise Blashke's Rolling Theorem to show our main result.