High Socioeconomic Status is Associated with Diverse Consumption across Brands and Price Levels

2025-06-16

AI Summary

This study investigates whether high socioeconomic status (SES) drives consumption diversity across brands and price tiers, and identifies the underlying sociocultural mechanisms. Leveraging millions of mobile device location records from New York State to construct granular in-person store visit data, we employ multilevel regression models and conduct robustness checks across regions (NY/TX) and SES indicators (income/education). We provide the first large-scale spatiotemporal evidence for “culturally mediated consumption diversity”: high-SES individuals exhibit significantly broader, cross-class consumption patterns—robust to controls for geographic accessibility, neighborhood diversity, and residential mobility. The effect attenuates for necessities and within NYC submarkets but replicates consistently in the Texas sample. By moving beyond supply-side constraints, this work establishes cultural capital—not merely economic resources—as central to consumption stratification.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or lifestyle-based niche consumption. We provide empirical evidence for this diversity hypothesis by analysing millions of mobile-tracked visits from thousands of Census Block Groups to thousands of stores in New York State. The results show that high income is significantly associated with diverse consumption across brands and price levels. The associations between diversity and income persist but are less prominent for necessity-based consumption and for the densely populated and demographically diverse New York City. The associations replicate for education as an alternative measure of socioeconomic status and for the state of Texas. We further illustrate that the associations cannot be explained by simple geographic constraints, including the neighbourhoods' demographic diversity, the residents' geographic mobility and the stores' local availability, so deeper social and cultural factors must be at play.

Problem

• How socioeconomic status affects diverse brand and price consumption
• Exploring cultural and social influences on consumption diversity
• Assessing geographic and demographic impacts on consumption patterns

Innovation

• Mobile-tracked visits analysis
• Diverse consumption across brands
• Income and education associations