In order to help us better understand supply and demand, economists have placed the things we buy into different categories. One such category is a positional good, described by Dr. Sheldon Cooper as “an economic concept in which an object is only valued by the possessor because it’s not possessed by others.” The ubiquitous character from The Big Bang Theory went on to describe the term—coined in 1976 by economist Fred Hirsch—as a replacement for “the more colloquial, but less precise neener-neener.”
There are four other categories, including normal goods, inferior goods, Giffen goods, and Veblen goods. Normal and inferior goods are tied together as the inverse of one another, meaning “what is a normal good for one person may be an inferior good for another person, and vice-versa.” When the income of the people in a particular market increases, a normal good’s demand will increase; if the demand for a good decreases under the same circumstances, the good is dubbed inferior. In the area of transportation, for example, riding in a limousine would be a normal good and riding the subway would be an inferior good.