The more conspicuous a product, the sooner it is noticed. If neighbors talk about their expenditures on some goods, then they are more conspicuous than otherwise. The logic is simple: visibility is a cultural as well as a physical property. The index of visibility, or "vindex," is the average score for how long it would take to notice that the consumer spent more than average on a product. Responses were assigned a score of one to five, ranging from never to almost immediately. "Would you notice this about them, and if so, for how long would you have to have known them to notice it?" He first requested that respondents "imagine that you meet a new person who lives in a household similar to yours." Then, for each of 29 types of products, which together account for most of consumer spending, he asked them to imagine that the household spent more than average on that product. Heffetz measured the visibility of various products by conducting a telephone survey of 243 randomly chosen individuals last summer.
To determine whether conspicuous consumption is a rarity deserving little attention or central to understanding what people buy, it is necessary to have a measure of the extent to which a good is conspicuous.
Because conspicuous consumption makes others feel less successful, some economists have argued that society would be better off if a high tax rate were applied to goods that are the object of conspicuous consumption. If true, such behavior can set off a wasteful rat race, in which people buy expensive products they don't particularly like only to "keep up with the Joneses" and signal their lofty status. In Veblen's view, the wealthy engage in conspicuous consumption to advertise their wealth. A major motivation for buying an extravagant watch is to signal to others that the consumer has "made it," a point not lost on advertisers. A Timex watch, for example, tells time about as well as a Rolex, but the particular watch you wear tells a lot about your purchasing power and personality. The idea of conspicuous consumption is intuitive. Sure enough, he finds in his thesis that conspicuous items make up a greater share of the consumption budget in wealthier families. Now, Ori Heffetz, a doctoral student in economics at Princeton University, has developed the first broad-gauged index of product visibility. Yet conspicuous consumption remained mainly a theoretical curiosity for more than a century, with little empirical content or support. LONG before Thorstein Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption," economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx had argued that people choose to buy some goods because of what those goods reveal about their standing in society, not because of any intrinsic enjoyment they get from the purchase.
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