Conspicuous Consumption

Conspicuous consumption is the expenditure of money on luxury goods and services primarily to display social status rather than to satisfy intrinsic needs. Introduced by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the concept describes how economic behavior is shaped by signaling dynamics in which the cost of the display itself constitutes the message. A Veblen good is precisely a commodity whose demand increases as its price rises, because the high price is the signal. Conspicuous consumption is therefore not irrational behavior corrected by better information; it is costly signaling in which the expense is the semantic content, and the audience is the social hierarchy itself.