Hope is desperate for the new designer purse that she saw while window shopping at her local mall. She knew every girl in school would covet her bag and wish to be like her. When she walked in, she whipped out her credit card and purchased the $5,000 bag. This kind of purchasing is called:

conspicuous consumption

Explanation:

The term conspicuous consumption was first introduced by a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist known as Thorstein Veblen in 1899. Conspicuous consumption refers to the practice whereby expensive goods or services are purchased by certain people at an outrageous cost just for the sake of display of flamboyant lifestyle or wealth for recognition purpose rather than for the very basic need the goods or services meet. It is simply an act of wasteful spending on goods or services that other people of that social class on a normal day cannot afford to pay such expensive price for.

The case of Hope is simply a kind of conspicuous consumption as she doesn’t mind emptying her credit card to afford the luxury of the new designer purse just for the purpose of public display among her social class.