Fashion’s Effect on Consumer’s Preference Formation

Abstract:

It is widely known that all principles of economics textbooks do not consider advertising much less fashion a demand determinant factor. Fashion’s effect on consumer choice is a critically important topic to the understanding of consumer behavior and decision-making in the “new economy.” The discussion of such issues includes verifying the effect of three important fashion market features on consumer preference formation and choice, namely the length of product life cycle, demand volatility, and impulse purchasing. It seems that time has come to concede that fashion firms, especially those producing fast or “junk” fashion, if you will, have successfully been affecting consumer preferences and have manipulated consumer choices for the sake of their own interests. Such a goal has been achieved by exploiting the fashion market features by employing specific marketing strategies, within the framework of supply chain agility, such as product remodeling, product customization, and revisions or innovation.     

Choosing one’s own informal institutions: on Hayek’s critique of Keynes’s immoralism

In the main, Hayek favored rules that apply equally to all and located such rules in tradition, beyond conscious construction. This led Hayek to attack Keynes’s immoralism, i.e., the position that one should be free to choose how to lead one’s life irrespective of the informal institutions in place. However, it is argued here that immoralism may be compatible with Hayek’s enterprise since Hayek misinterpreted Keynes, who did not advocate the dissolving of all informal rules for everybody. By avoiding this misinterpretation, immoralism can be seen as institutional experimentation at the margin, which Hayek himself favored.

Hotelling’s webshop

We extend Hotelling’s model of spatial competition by adding an outside good, provided by a webshop. Unlike the commonly used reservation price, the price of the webshop is endogenous. We establish that a Nash equilibrium exists if the outside good is not too different from the goods sold by the bricks-and-mortar shops. Equilibrium prices positively depend on transport costs, which would not be the case for an exogenous reservation price. If the webshop serves an alternative market as well, the price of that market is partly imported into the local market. The bricks-and-mortar shops compete only with the the webshop. The lower the webshop’s delivery costs are relative to the transport cost parameter, the wider the feasible range for locations of the bricks-and-mortar shops.     

Microsoft’s AOL

Why the bidding from Redmond has a whiff of anotherfamous tech deal that didn’t go so well.The idea that Microsoft would take Yahoo as its hapless partner has beendiscussed for years down in the Valley.But most of the folks I’ve talked to pret-ty much dismissed it as too wrong tocontemplate. Even Microsoft, dissed byValley Guys as not getting the Web (seeprevious column here), wouldn’t actual-ly go through with it, Yahoo’s decent dowry notwithstanding.     

Vicarelli’s Keynes (and today’s international disorder)

The article speculates about the legacy of Fausto Vicarelli’s interpretation of John Maynard Keynes’s work in the times of a major global crisis. In particular, it puts an emphasis on those aspects of Keynes’s “method” that Vicarelli rightly considered as revolutionary in his Keynes, of 1977, as well as in other writings. The article then turns to Vicarelli’s reconstruction of Keynes’s early work in international economics (Indian Currency and Finance, Economic Consequences of the Peace) and reflects upon the continuing relevance of the philosophy inspiring Keynes’s plans of global reform in the Forties, also in the light of Vicarelli’s (Keynes-inspired) vision of the problem of policy space at the international level.