Thorstein Veblen, auteur de La théorie du loisir (1899), est commémoré en sciences économiques par «l'effet Veblen», terme introduit par Harvey Leibenstein pour représenter une réponse positive de la demande des consommateurs à une augmentation de prix. L’article de Leibenstein de 1950 qui introduit «l’effet Veblen» ne cite pas Veblen parmi ses 17 références.Je commence cette thèse en revisitant la théorie de Veblen sur le comportement du consommateur et en évaluant son traitement ultérieur dans la littérature économique. Je trouve que Leibenstein (1950) interprète mal le concept de «consommation ostentatoire» de Veblen et contredit les prédictions empiriques de Veblen.Comment la théorie de Veblen pourrait-elle être interprétée plus fidèlement et avec plus de pertinence pour les marchés actuels? Dans cette thèse, j'essaie d'observer certains attributs et certaines primes de Veblen sur les marchés de consommation actuels.Je présente des résultats expérimentaux sur les marchés de la vente au détail américains de bière (partie II), de vin (partie III) et de produits alimentaires (partie IV). J'utilise diverses techniques expérimentales, notamment des enquêtes auprès des consommateurs, des expériences de dégustation à l'aveugle, des expériences de laboratoire et des expériences d'infiltration. / Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), is memorialized in economics by the “Veblen effect,” a term introduced by Harvey Leibenstein to represent a positive consumer demand response to an increase in price. However, Leibenstein’s 1950 QJE article introducing the world to the “Veblen effect” does not cite Veblen as one of its 17 references.I begin this dissertation by revisiting Veblen’s theory of consumer behavior and evaluating its subsequent treatment in the economics literature. I find that Leibenstein (1950) misunderstands Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption” and contradicts Veblen’s empirical predictions.How might Veblen’s theory be interpreted more faithfully with relevance to present-day markets? I suggest that the notion of “Veblen goods” and “Veblen consumers” is misleading, because Veblen’s theories applied to nearly all goods and consumers. My alternative approach is to look for attributes and corresponding prices whose market behavior is in line with Veblen’s predictions. I divide the attributes of goods into three classes, and I suggest that each class has its own hedonic price component: “useful,” “decorative,” and “invisible” attributes.Invisible attributes cannot be detected by the consumer’s own unaided sensory apparatus. Examples of invisible attributes are a good’s market price, scarcity, reputation, ratings, place of origin, microbial content, organic certification, and age. I refer to decorative and invisible attributes, together, as “Veblen attributes”; and I refer to the premiums consumers are willing to pay for Veblen attributes as “Veblen premiums.”In this thesis, I attempt to observe some Veblen attributes and Veblen premiums in present-day consumer markets. I report experimental results from the U.S. retail markets for beer (part II), wine (part III), and food (part IV). I employ a variety of experimental techniques, including consumer surveys, blind tasting experiments, lab experiments, and undercover experiments. I include several first-person essays to round out the narrative.

In this dissertation, I develop theoretical models and an empirical study of the role of social interactions, the evolution of social norms, and their impact on individual behavior. Although my models are consistent with individual utility maximization, they generally emphasize social factors that channel individual decisions and/or shape individuals' preferences. I apply this approach to three different issues: labor supply, fertility decisions, and intergenerational transfers, generating predictions that are more consistent with observed empirical patterns of behavior than standard neoclassical approaches that assume independent preferences, perfect information, and efficient markets. In the first essay, I explain the long-run evolution of working hours during the 20th century in developed countries: the substantial decline for the first three quarters of the 20th century and the deceleration or even reversal of the fall in working hours in the last quarter. I develop a model of the determination of working hours and how this process is affected by both the conflict between employers and employees and the employees' desire to emulate the consumption standards of the rich reference group. The model also explores the effects of direct and indirect policies to limit hours advocated by political representations of workers such as trade unions or leftist parties. In the second essay, I study the coevolution of gender norms and fertility regimes. Since the 1990s, a new pattern of positive correlation between fertility rates and female labor force participation emerged in developed countries. This recent trend seems inconsistent with conventional economic approaches that explain fertility decline as a result of the increasing opportunity costs of childrearing, predicting a negative correlation between fertility and women's labor force participation. To address this puzzle, I develop a model of the evolution of gender norms and fertility in various economic environments influenced by the level of women's wages. Randomly matched spouses make choices related to fertility - labor supply and the division of household labor - based on their preferences shaped by gender norms. In the model, norm updating is influenced by both within-family payoffs and conformism payoffs from social interactions among the same sex. The model shows how changes in economic environments and the degree of conformism toward norms can alter fertility outcomes. The results suggest that the asymmetric evolution of gender norms between men and women could contribute to very low fertility, explaining the positive correlation between fertility and women's labor force participation. Finally, I estimate the effect of exogenously introduced public pensions for the elderly on the amount of private transfers they receive. There has been a long debate whether public transfers crowd out private transfers. Previous empirical studies on this issue suffer from the endogeneity of income that contaminates estimates. I use an exogenously introduced public transfer, the Basic Old Age Pension in Korea, to test the crowding out hypothesis. A considerable proportion of the elderly population, especially women living without a spouse, do not experience the crowding out effect and moreover, among those who do, the size of the effect is relatively small. The results support the redistribution effect of the Basic Old Age Pension targeting the poor elderly in Korea.