Urban Amenities and Rural Sufficiency: Living Standards and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1643–1777
研究了18世纪中期切萨皮克地区不同财富水平的家庭如何能够并愿意购买非必需消费品，指出乡村居民并非模仿城市消费模式，而是在不改变传统资源分配方式下提高了消费水平。
By the mid-eighteenth century, tidewater Chesapeake households at all levels of wealth were both able and willing to buy a wide range of non-essential consumer goods either previously unavailable or long considered unimportant. The use of amenities and often luxuries as props for increasingly elaborated and differentiated life styles was not a result of country folk imitating city consumption patterns, however. Urban life styles did produce new spending habits, but the vast majority of the population who lived in rural areas managed to improve their consumption levels without altering traditional patterns of resource allocation.