Unconscious status and car consumption: social comparison effects in a discrete choice experiment

This study investigates how social comparison affects consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for status-related car attributes. Drawing on theories of positional goods and social utility, we designed a discrete choice experiment (DCE) with a contextual priming component to measure the influence of perceived peer car status on WTP. A representative online sample of 1,289 German car owners evaluated car alternatives that varied in terms of engine power, car segment, SUV type, brand, interior equipment, and purchase price. We estimate both Mixed Logit and Latent Class models in WTP space to capture preference heterogeneity and social context effects. The results show that marginal WTP increases significantly with the perceived status of cars owned by peers, despite the fact that most respondents self-reported little to no influence. Our findings provide novel behavioral evidence of unconscious status consumption and offer a rationale for designing a status-based car tax to address positional externalities in transportation markets.