Seriously, do you have an iPhone too? Survey evidence of positional goods

Abstract

Independent of nationality, age, social class, the culture or the customs, the mobile phone has become, in a short period of time, as the most popular medium of communication chosen by humans. In little more than ten years it has become an essential element for the great majority of the population. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if the mobile phones as highly positional as other status goods as e.g. cars. By means of a survey with a small experiment, I tested whether visible goods, such as mobile phones, are more positional than less visible goods such as leisure. In the survey there are socioeconomic questions and in the experiment the chosen people had to decide questions about income, leisure and the value of mobile phones according to the choices made, the degree of positionality of the topics treated was measured. The results are consistent that income is more positional than work hours and visible goods, like the value of mobile phone, are more positional than less visible goods, like work hours. Due to the small number of observations, further research is needed to determine the positional value of mobile phones.