Context, Welfare Sensitivity and Positional Preferences in a Developing Country

It's well established in the empirical literature that people care about relative status or positionality, hence any policy that makes someone better off imposes a negative externality on his/her peers. However, the effectiveness of public policy aimed at mitigating positional externality hinges on the measurement of relative concerns, which is individual and context-specific requiring empirical data. This study investigates positional concerns among over-exploited natural resource-dependent communities with defined gender roles in a developing country, and the specific role of welfare sensitivity in moderating relative concerns. We found that compared to the women, the men were more positional, on average, and relative concerns are context-dependent for both genders. Next, the men had lower welfare sensitivity than the women, and for both groups, and for a specific context, being welfare sensitive over a narrow (broader) income range correlates with a relatively higher (lower) degree of positionality.