Institutional Economics and Consumption

Abstract

Conventional economics has given major attention to the production process. Consumption has been given a rather minor position in the classic perception of the economy. The institutional interpretation of the economy has given consumption greater significance. As a matter of fact the first major work in what is recognized to be institutional economics, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class lends itself readily to a useful analysis of the consumption process, something of which contemporary marketing science is only too well aware. The shadow of Jeremy Bentham hangs heavily over all of this traditional consumption theory, even that of classical economics, if we mean by the statement the spirit as well as the disembodied formal ideas. The utilitarian interpretation of human consumption behavior as a quest to maximize pleasant feelings and minimize the unpleasant has been construed as rational behavior in contemporary economic theory.

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