The Politics of Inequality as Organised Spectacle: Why the Swiss Do Not Want to Tax the Rich

In 2015, Swiss voters had the opportunity to impose a tax on the super rich in a popular vote and thereby fund a redistributive policy. However, a large majority voted against its seemingly obvious self-interest and rejected the tax. We propose an explanation for this puzzling outcome, bridging the usually separate behavioralist and institutionalist perspectives on the politics of inequality. We start from the observation that political economy tends to neglect processes of preference formation. Theorising preferences as socially constructed, we show that interest groups played a major role in shaping the outcome of the vote. Business frames were multiplied through allied parties and the media and had a major impact on individual voting behaviour. In addition, we demonstrate that interest groups representing business interests derive the content of their communication from business’s structurally privileged position in the capitalist economy. Specifically, creating uncertainty about possible perverse effects of government policies on jobs and growth is a powerful tool to undermine popular support. Frames based on this structural power ultimately explain why the Swiss refrained from ‘soaking the rich.’     

Is bank staff interaction associated with customer saving behavior in banks?

Major changes are underway in the U.S. retail banking sector toward heavy investments in technology and fewer in personnel. Using the 2017 survey of household economics and decision‐making (SHED) (n = 11,359), we examine the relationship between saving behavior related to emergency, long‐term and periodic expenses and personal, technological, and hybrid bank account access methods. Binary logistic regression models were used to estimate the odds of reporting various saving behaviors in relation to various banking access methods. Findings suggest that the personal access method is positively associated with savings behavior for periodic expenses for the general population, and negatively associated with emergency savings in people with lower education attainment. Technology is associated with all types of saving behavior, while the hybrid access method is associated only with saving for periodic expenses. As investments in self‐service technology increase, the importance of access methods to savings behavior must be considered.     

Are You a Chocolate Lover? An Investigation of the Repurchase Behavior of Chocolate Consumers

This study aimed to understand the factors affecting repurchase behavior of chocolate brands and, consequently, customer retention and acquisition. The study adopted a qualitative, inductive approach using in-depth interviews with 31 Australian consumers. The factors identified in the extant literature as antecedents of customers’ repurchase intention in the chocolate industry, including brand recognition, sales promotion, product price value, variety, taste, texture, size, packaging, and customer satisfaction, were confirmed. The results also indicated that functional value, product selection value, self-gratification value, socialization value, and transactional value were also considered during the consumer decision-making process. Implications for practitioners are provided.     

The role of influencer–follower congruence in the relationship between influencer marketing and purchase behaviour

Over the last decade, influencer marketing has become one of the most important tools for companies and brands to increase awareness, sales, or image strength. Since consumers prefer brands and companies whose image is congruent with their actual or ideal self, we could expect that consumers tend to prefer influencers whom they can compare themselves with. Therefore, congruence between consumer and influencer is imperative in influencer marketing and may indicate whether the influencer will be able to promote products to the target audience in an appealing way. Using a quantitative empirical study, we surveyed more than 7500 individuals measuring how they perceive a specific influencer's credibility, content usefulness, congruence, and purchase behaviour. The results suggest that if there is a congruence between an influencer and the follower, the impact of the influencer's experience and its content usefulness on purchase behaviour is stronger.     

Deep learning for modeling the collection rate for third-party buyers

This study evaluates a wide range of machine learning techniques such as deep learning, boosting, and support vector regression to predict the collection rate of more than 65,000 defaulted consumer credits from the telecommunications sector that were bought by a German third-party company. Weighted performance measures were defined based on the value of exposure at default for comparing collection rate models. The approach proposed in this paper is useful for a third-party company in managing the risk of a portfolio of defaulted credit that it purchases. The main finding is that one of the machine learning models we investigate, the deep learning model, performs significantly better out-of-sample than all other methods that can be used by an acquirer of defaulted credits based on weighted-performance measures. By using unweighted performance measures, deep learning and boosting perform similarly. Moreover, we find that using a training set with a larger proportion of the dataset does not improve prediction accuracy significantly when deep learning is used. The general conclusion is that deep learning is a potentially performance-enhancing tool for credit risk management.     

Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: An Empirical Revisit of West German Consumers' Attitudes Toward Products and Brands from Former East Germany

More than 25 years after the German reunification, data show that products/brands from the eastern regions of Germany (“Neue Länder”) still do not have significant shares in the country's western part (“Alte Länder”). To analyze potential reasons for this phenomenon, our current study replicates a previous study that investigated selected attitudes of Alte Länder consumers toward products/brands from the Neue Länder. It is shown that factors such as consumer ethnocentrism, product judgment, willingness to buy, and economic animosity continue to influence consumer behavior and as such our study offers potential explanation for the failure of Neue Länder products/brands in the western regions of Germany.     

Media-Based Sentiment Indices as an Alternative Measure of Consumer Confidence

In this paper, we consider the feasibility of constructing online sentiment indices, using large amounts of media data, as an alternative to the conventional survey method used to create the consumer confidence index in South Africa. A clustering framework is adopted to provide an indication of possible candidate sentiment indices constructed from a combination of different text sources and dictionaries that best mimic the traditional survey-based consumer confidence index from the South African Bureau for Economic Research (BER). The results conclude that it is possible to create an index using sentiment analysis using online editorial data that does resemble the BER’s consumer confidence index. The different media-based sentiment indices (MSI) show a significant level of correlation and co-movement with the BER’s CCI. Impulse responses and cross-correlation functions indicate that the MSI could potentially lead the survey-based method up to two quarters. Furthermore, Granger-causality tests show that the media-based indices are good predictors of future consumer confidence index values. The results provide motivation for further study on the use of sentiment-based techniques and online media data sources to track consumer confidence within an emerging market such as South Africa.     

Changes in food provision in Russian households experiencing perestroika

The purpose of this article is to describe how households in Novgorod the Great, Russia, deal with food provision in everyday life. The study focuses on changes experienced in food provision and consumption in Russian society, in order to illustrate how households respond to the transformation towards a market economy. The study reflects women's perspective on food provision. Students from Novgorod the Great visited 105 households and asked the women in the household to answer a questionnaire. Results from the study show that in order to cope with changes in society related to economic reforms, Russian households had changed both their food consumption and food production patterns. There was no big difference between urban and rural households. Nearly all of the households were self‐sufficient in the provision of vegetables and potatoes. Many households had a ‘dacha’ (plot), where they produced most of what they needed. Among the changes experienced during recent years (i.e. during the end of the 1990s), a decade after perestroika was initiated, households mentioned the rise in food prices and the decrease of income. Households reported that they consumed less fruit and/or meat. Some households also mentioned that the quality of nourishment had decreased, thereby indicating lower general quality, lower nutrition value, or less healthy foodstuffs.     

论当前我国可持续消费文化的建构

可持续消费是可持续发展研究的一个重要内容，也是实现可持续发展的重要机制之一。可持续消费文化本质上就是要强调人与社会、人与人、人与自然、人与文化协调一致发展。文章基于社会问题本质上是一种社会建构产物的观点，从消费社会学视角探讨了转型期我国建构可持续消费文化的基本条件及其社会文化机制问题。     

Consumer socialization,social structural factors and decision‐making styles: a case study of adolescents in Malaysia

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the process of consumer socialization will determine adolescents’ decision‐making styles. Eight decision‐making styles were conceptualized as outcomes of the socialization process, which is acquired via interaction with socialization agents, namely parents, peers, printed media, television commercials and in‐school education. The study also proposed five social structural variables (social class, gender, ethnicity, residence and religion) as being associated with the socialization agents and decision‐making styles. The study sample consisted of 934 adolescents between the ages of 16 and 19 years. The data were collected using a self‐administered questionnaire and analysed with the SPSS computer program. As a result of regression analyses, significant relationships were found between social structural factors and socialization processes, suggesting that the influence of socialization agents on adolescents may vary according to certain demographic characteristics. Significant relationships were also found between social structural factors and socialization processes. Peers appeared to be the most important agents of consumer socialization, contributing to a variety of desirable as well as undesirable consumer decision styles. Printed media and television commercials were also found to be significant sources of the acquisition of both desirable and undesirable decision‐making styles. Parents and in‐school education, however, were insignificant in the acquisition of any decision‐making styles among adolescents. Information obtained from this study could be useful to government agencies and consumer educators. The most revealing finding of this study is that parents did not contribute to the formulation of decision‐making orientation for adolescents. This points to the need for consumer educators to take steps in designing programmes that will involve parents as primary socialization agents at home; this may be facilitated via printed materials. Apart from this, the information can also be helpful in enabling marketers to be more effective in targeting various adolescent markets by formulating marketing strategies according to demographic factors, socialization process and decision‐making styles.