ON THE CULTURAL TRANSMISSION OF PREFERENCES FOR SOCIAL-STATUS

We study the formation of preferences for 'social status' as the resul t of intergenerational transmission of cultural traits. We characteriz e the behavior of parents with preferences for status in terms of soci alization of their children to this particular cultural trait. We show that degenerate distributions of the population (whereby agents have either all status preferences or all non-status preferences) are dynam ically unstable. Moreover, under some conditions, there exists a uniqu e stationary distribution which is non-degenerate (in which both statu s and non-status preferences co-exist in the population), and this dis tribution is locally stable. Finally, we study the dependence of the s table stationary distribution of status preferences on institutional, technological and policy parameters which affect agents' economic cond itions. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.