On “relational goods”: strategic implications of investment in relationships

Abstract

Discusses the concept of “relational goods”, defined as intangible capital assets that inhere in enduring interpersonal relationships and provide both intrinsic and instrumental benefits. They are local public goods that are formed or maintained through non‐contractible, co‐ordinated actions. Presents a simple model of investment in exogenously formed two‐person relationships and discusses the model under different assumptions as to agents’ homogeneity, pair formation and type observability. Discusses the possibility of endogenous type change and interprets it in terms of the evolution of cultural attitudes towards such a peculiar and fragile asset, as are relationships.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.