Social Preferences, Public Good Provision, Social Capital and Positional Concerns: Empirical Evidence from the South Caucasus

This paper aims to study the impact of positional concerns on an understudied set of policy-relevant variables: social preferences, public good provision, and social capital. We utilize data from the “Caucasus Barometer” survey administered in three post-Soviet transition economies: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Controlling for absolute income and other individual and household characteristics, we find that the relative deprivation of a household has negative impacts on its members’ social preferences, public good provision, and social capital. In contrast, relative advantage has only positive influences on the variables of interest (if any).