Consumer protection in Switzerland by means of “soft law” — Practices and perspectives

Consumer protection by self-regulation has come into focus as a proposed alternative to consumer legislation. This paper tries to show the principal forms in which soft law rules have been established in Switzerland, and to outline some of the main problems to which they have been exposed in practice.To a great extent self-regulation has centered, up to now, in the hands of the trade itself, although consumer organisations participate in some commissions for extra-judicial settlement. The principal deficiencies of self-regulation concern its enforcement and its scope of applicability when the trade is organised only to a limited extent. It has also been prowed that the drawing up of soft law rules has hindered legislation and, in some instances, also court practice.The authors come to the conclusion that some of the conditions without which soft law cannot achieve an effective impact on the trade are missing in Switzerland. However, positive contributions of soft law to consumer protection can sometimes be discerned where legislation has not succeeded.

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Zusammenfassung Die Schwierigkeiten, denen die Verbrauchergesetzgebung auch in der Schweiz begegnet, haben dazu geführt, dass die von der Wirtschaft als Alternative vorgeschlagene Selbstkontrolle stärker in den Mittelpunkt des Interesses gerückt ist als bisher. Der Artikel versucht — soweit ersichtlich, erstmals —, die verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen von soft law in der Schweiz aufzuzeigen und die wesentlichen Schwierigkeiten herauszuarbeiten, denen es in der Praxis begegnet.Die Selbstkontrolle der Wirtschaft bei Verbrauchergeschäften liegt zum grossen Teil ausschliesslich in den Händen der Wirtschaftsverbände. Die Verbraucherorganisationen beteiligen sich an ihr, auch aus finanziellen und personellen Gründen, nur zurückhaltend, wobei der Schwerpunkt dieser Beteiligung in der aussergerichtlichen Streitbeilegung und nicht in der Erarbeitung von materiellrechtlichen Regeln zu finden ist. Der Staat ist bis heute nur in einem Einzelfall interveniert, um eine effektive Selbstkontrolle zu gewährleisten.Die Hauptschwächen von soft law betreffen seine Durchsetzung und die Weite seines Anwendungsbereichs, zumal die verschiedenen Branchen in der Schweiz nur teilweise in repräsentativen Wirtschaftsverbänden organisiert sind. Bedenklich ist insbesondere der negative Einfluss, den soft law-Regelungen auf die Fortentwicklung der Verbrauchergesetzgebung und teilweise auch der Rechtsprechung ausgeübt haben.Einige unabdingbare Voraussetzungen für einen effektiven Verbraucherschutz durch Selbstkontrolle sind in der Schweiz nicht gegeben. Gleichwohl trägt das soft law vornehmlich in den Bereichen zum Verbraucherschutz etwas bei, in denen eine Gesetzgebung bisher nicht möglich war.

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Bernd Stauder is Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Geneva, Place de l'Université, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland. Joachim Feldges is a Research Assistant. Peter Mülbert is a former Research Assistant at this Faculty.Michael Bühler, Geneva/Düsseldorf, furnished an important contribution when the paper was first prepared.This article is a shortened version of the German original text, published under the title Praxis und Perspektiven von Konsumentenschutz durch soft law in der Schweiz in Zeitschrift für Schweizerisches Recht 1984 I. The authors are grateful to John Perry for translating the original German text into English.     

Real Wages,Business Cycles and New Production Patterns

In contrast with most conventional business cycle models, empirical data show no clear correlation between real wage movements and output and employment. This paper presents a model, largely based on concepts presented by Joseph Schumpeter,in which economic growth and the business cycle are triggered by endogenous real shocks to technology. It suggests that the speed and magnitude by which technological shocks spread throughout the economy determine whether the resulting changes in real wages will be pro-or counter-cyclical.     

A framework for thinking about Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS)

Strategic problem solving in organizations is a social process that disturbs established social relationships. Maintaining a negotiated social order is crucial to political feasibility and to emotional commitment from the participants in relation to a solution package. However, Group Decision Support Systems that attend overly to managing social order risk group think through bounded vision. This may be avoided if emotional commitment is also encouraged through participants experiencing the problem situation from multiple perspectives and in relation to alternative solution strategies. Commitment depends upon both means/ends rationality and procedural rationality. This acknowledges the balance in providing support to a group with respect to the negotiation of social order, with the more traditional group decision support for socially negotiating order out of the problem situation. This article argues that effective Group Decision Support Systems must attend to both aspects of creating order. OR modelling methods and the support that can be provided by modern micro-computers offer a new way forward—models can be toys that a group can play with together, enabling them to create knowledge as well as use it.     

Consumer protection in the EEC after ratification of the single act

The paper analyses those aspects of the Single European Act which have an impact on consumer policy in the EEC. Consumer protection is only indirectly referred to by the Act, whereas environmental policy, and thereby also health aspects, are expressly addressed.Consumers have little to gain but much to lose by a strict application of the integration concept of the Act which is an expression of the intention to create a single market before 1992. It is not clear how EEC and Member State measures are to be co-ordinated.Unfortunately, implementation of EEC consumer and environmental policies has not been improved through the Act. In the future, implementation policy should concern not only the creation of a Common Market forproducers, but should be extended to include common standards of protection for Europeanconsumers.

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Verbraucherpolitik in der EG nach der Ratifizierung der Einheitlichen Europäischen Akte

Zusammenfassung Die Stellungnahme der European Consumer Law Group, eines Zusammenschlusses europäischer juristischer Praktiker und Forscher auf dem Gebiet des Verbraucherrechts, beschäftigt sich mit den Auswirkungen der Einheitlichen Europäischen Akte auf die Verbraucherpolitik in der EG. Es überwiegt eine skeptische Einstellung, weil die Akte die Verbraucherpolitik nur indirekt erwähnt und vor allem bezweckt, einen einheitlichen Binnenmarkt bis 1992 zu schaffen. Positiv ist die ausdrückliche Verankerung der Umweltpolitik als neuer Politikbereich der EG zu vermerken, die über Gesundheitsaspekte auf den Verbraucherschutz zurückwirkt. Die Implementation des EG-Verbraucherrechts ist allerdings auch durch die Akte nicht verbessert worden. Gefordert wird insgesamt eine neue Einstellung zur EG-Integration: der Begriff des Gemeinsamen Markets muß um gemeinsame Schutzstandards für alle europäischen Verbraucher ergänzt werden.

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The European Law Group (ECLG) is a group of lawyers and law scholars in the EEC, concerned with legal aspects of consumer protection. Correspondence regarding the paper should be directed to: Professor Norbert Reich, Centre for European Legal Policy, Universitätsallee GW1, D-2800 Bremen 33, Federal Republic of Germany.     

Student Ethical Perceptions and Ethical Action Propensities: An Analysis of Situation Familiarity

Recently McCuddy and Peery (1996) have suggested that business students may not respond the same way to unfamiliar business ethical dilemmas as they would to more familiar academic ethical dilemmas. The purpose of this study was to present the same students with both unfamiliar business dilemmas as well as possibly more familiar academic dilemmas in order to examine this issue.Findings of the study revealed that students did not exhibit different perceptions of the unethical actions performed in the academic and accounting/business ethical vignettes. However, the students indicated that both they and their peers would be more likely to act unethically to resolve the dilemmas in the accounting/business cases than in the academic cases. This finding is troubling in that it suggests that students either feel less compelled to act ethically in business, or that they perceive that ethical standards in the business world are generally low when compared to their current educational environment. In addition, the students in the study maintained the same halo effect (i.e., the difference between an individual's perception of their likelihood of performing an unethical action compared to their perception of their peers' likelihood to perform the same unethical action) across the two types of ethical dilemma.     

Can Ethical Organizational Character Be Stimulated and Enabled?: “Upbuilding” Dialog As Crisis Management Method

Crisis management can be simultaneously a content specific problem solving process and an opportunity for stimulating and enabling an organizations ethical tradition. Crisis can be an opportunity for ethical organizational development. Kierkegaardian upbuilding dialog method builds from within the internal ethical tradition of an organization to respond to crises while simultaneously adapting and protecting the organizations tradition. The crisis itself may not be a directly ethical crisis, but the method of responding to the crisis is built upon the ethical foundations of an organizations tradition. A limitation of this method is that it may be less applicable to organizations with questionably ethical traditions. The concept of upbuilding dialog is derived from Kierkegaard, but here is applied to organizational crisis management. The method is illustrated and discussed in the context of a wrongful death crisis of the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute, a nonprofit organization, and an economic survival crisis at Ben and Jerrys, a business organization.     

Justice: The root of american business ideology and ethics

Although there are many conceptions of Justice, these different perceptions can provide many interesting insights into a business person's ethical standards as well as that person's decision-making processes. Using the Bishops' Pastoral Letter on the U.S. Economy as the basis for asking questions about justice, twenty-four business executives were interviewed about their conception of justice. An analysis of these interviews reveals that this group of businesspeople operated under very different conceptions of Justice at the Macroenvironmental and Microenvironmental levels. This result has some interesting implications not only for those scholars concerned with business ethics but for everyone who has a stake in business education.Men are called good, chiefly on account of their Justice. Cicero, 56 B.C. Ideology is applied philosophy. Lodge, 1986 Richard McGowan, S. J. is an Assistant Professor of Operations and Strategic Management at Boston College. His research focus involves examining both the rationale behind business and public policy decisions as well as determining the effectiveness of these policy measures. Some of his recent publications include Deciphering the Japanese Import Quota, Policy Studies Journal (1988) and Public Policy Measures and Cigarette Sales: An ARIMA Intervention Analysis Study JAI Social Issues Management Volume (1989).     

Changing demand for opening hours in Norway. Consumer policy implications

In Norway, a lively mass media debate, together with legal deregulation, has caused shops to extend their opening hours. In addition, the same debate slightly influenced consumer demand for extended opening hours. Consumer demand also changed in response to the actual extension of opening hours, an effect which was stronger than the mass media effect. In some cases, the demand for extended opening hours appears to have been based upon objective needs, in other cases upon subjective desires. Underlying the debate and the deregulation there must be some basic phenomena connected to the general economic and cultural development in society, since the appearance of the opening hours issue on the political agenda has occurred more or less simultaneously in several European countries.

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Änderungen beim Bedarf nach Ladenöffnungszeiten in Norwegen — verbraucherpolitische Implikationen

Zusammenfassung Die Liberalisierung der Regelung der Ladenöffnungszeiten und eine lebhafte Debatte darüber in den Massenmedien hat in Norwegen viele Läden zu einer Ausweitung ihrer Öffnungszeiten veranlaßt. Auch der Wunsch der Konsumenten nach verlängerten Öffnungszeiten wurde durch diese Debatte leicht beeinflußt. Stärker allerdings wurde dieser Wunsch durch die tatsächliche Ausweitung der Öffnungszeiten beeinflußt. Man kann sogar sagen, daß das Angebot verlängerter Öffnungszeiten die entsprechende Nachfrage erst geschaffen hat und nicht umgekehrt. In manchen Fällen dürfte die Nachfrage nach längeren Öffnungszeiten auf objektive Bedürfnisse, in anderen Fällen auf subjektive Wünsche zurückgehen.Forschungsergebnisse zeigen, daß der Wunsch von Konsumenten nach längeren Öffnungszeiten umso stärker ist, je dichter besiedelt das Gebiet ist, in dem sie leben. Ferner zeigt sich, daß jüngere Konsumenten längere Öffnungszeiten (bei Geschäften und bei Banken) haben wollen als ältere. Ähnliches gilt für politisch konservativ eingestellte Konsumenten und für solche, die lange Arbeitszeiten haben. Andererseits gibt es aber auch Konsumenten, die eigentlich einen objektiven Bedarf nach längeren Öffnungszeiten haben müßten, diese subjektiv aber nicht wünschen (z. B. solche, deren Arbeitszeit die Ladenöffnungszeiten überstreicht). Diese Einstellung resultiert vermutlich aus traditionellen Denkformen und aus empfundenen Konflikten zwischen Verbraucher- und Arbeitsinteressen. Manche Konsumenten äußern ausdrücklich ihre Solidarität mit den Beschäftigten in den Geschäften, deren Arbeitszeit von den Änderungen der Öffnungszeiten berührt wird. Wenn andererseits ein Wunsch nach längeren Öffnungszeiten tatsächlich besteht, so steht dahinter häufig das stärker empfundene eigene Verbraucherinteresse, häufig werden aber längere Öffnungszeiten einfach nur als bequem und attraktiv empfunden.

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Randi Lavik is a Research Fellow at the Norwegian Fund for Market and Distribution Research (FMD). Her address: FMD, Fredensborgveien 24 G, N-0177 Oslo 1, Norway.     

Board-management relations in small firms: The paradox of simultaneous independence and interdependence

The author introduces constructs based on neo-classical and socio-economic assumptions, and argues that board-management relations should be characterized by both independence and interdependence. Interdependence is especially important in small firms. The article presents a model of directorates from research about directorates based on agency theory assumptions. This model is supplemented with constructs from the theory of contractual relations. Whilst traditional literature tends to focus upon independence from an agency theory perspective, this article argues that it is necessary to use more than one dimension of attributes regarding the board-management relations in order to understand the board's contribution to company performance, and that trust and solidarity is especially important in small firms. Board-management relations described by simultaneous independence and interdependence are proposed to give the highest contribution to company performance. The theoretical propositions are exemplified and supported by results of a field survey of directorates in small firms.     

Entscheidungsbedingte Kaufkraftverluste: Formen,Umfang und verbraucherpolitische Relevanz

Zusammenfassung Entscheidungsbedingte Kaufkraftverluste treten dann auf, wenn Verbraucher wegen beschränkter Markttransparenz Kaufentscheidungen treffen, die zu finanziellen Einbußen fürhren. Am Beispiel von drei verbraucherinformationspolitischen Maßnahmen werden Formen und Umfang entscheidungsbedingter Kaufkraftverluste herausgearbeitet. Vielleicht gelingt es, mit Hilfe dieser Kaufkraftverluste erste Auswahlkriterien und erste Ansätze einer Erfolgskontrolle im Rahmen der Verbraucherpolitik aufzuzeigen. Vielleicht gelingt es aber auch, dem Verbraucher den potentiellen finanziellen Schaden uninformierten Kaufentscheidungsverhaltens vor Augen zu führen, in der Hoffnung, daß er nun eher dazu motiviert ist, sich nicht nur bei extensiven Kaufentscheidungsprozessen informationsaktiver zu verhalten.

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Monetary losses caused by uninformed purchase decisions: About their implications for consumer policy and various ways of calculating them

Frequently, the uninformed consumer makes buying decisions which differ from the decisions of the information seeker. Often, this takes the form of products with a higher price but not corresponding improvement of quality being chosen, or products with a lower quality but no corresponding reduction in price. In both cases, the uninformed consumer suffers a monetary loss (a loss in money income, Morris & Bronson, 1970).In this paper, three ways of calculating such a monetary loss are presented. Two of these are taken from the literature (Granger & Billson, 1972; Russo, 1977) and concern the calculation of real losses which result from the choice of unnecessarily expensive products, owing to difficulties in calculating and comparing unit prices, when stores do not make these extremely manifest. The third calculation concerns a more hypothetical entity, the potential loss that can be incurred by choosing the most expensive brand in a product class rather than the cheapest of those brands which have been rated as very good by the German product-testing agency Stiftung Warentest. In turns out that these potential losses are oftentimes very large. The author is of the opinion that the relative size of these losses can be used for selecting those classes of products where the need for consumer actions, above all for information about prices and qualities, is particulary urgent. Furthermore, the efficiency of such actions can be measured in terms of changes in the size of the losses. The consumers themselves might also be induced towards more extensive pre-purchase search, were they made aware of the size of these potential losses.

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Udo Beier ist Professor für Wirtschaftslehre des Haushalts und Verbraucherpolitik an der Universität Hamburg, Fachbereich Erziehungswissenschaft, Von-Melle-Park 8, D-2000 Hamburg 13.     

Does Greater Amount of Information Always Bolster Attitudinal Resistance?

Previous research suggests that attitudinal resistance to information that challenges a prior evaluation increases with the amount of information underlying the prior evaluation. We revisit this proposition in a context in which a set of important claims about a target brand are presented either alone—a lower amount of isolated information—or along with other favorable, but less important claims—a higher amount of embedded information. Results from two experiments show that when the challenge occurs immediately after the initial evaluation, a greater amount of embedded initial information does produce greater attitudinal resistance. However, when the challenge occurs after a delay, a lesser amount of isolated information produces greater attitudinal resistance. The findings qualify previous assumptions about the role of prior information in attitudinal resistance, and support a constructive view of judgment revision and attitudinal resistance.     

Einkommenslage und Einkommensverwendungspotential Älterer in Deutschland

Mit Hinweis auf die künftige demographische Entwicklung und hohe Alterseinkommen von Rentnern werden Vorschläge zur Umverteilung zwischen den Generationen zugunsten Jüngerer und zulasten Älterer begründet. Wie steht es um die Alterseinkommen jetzt und zukünftig in Deutschland?Prof. Dr. Winfried Schmähl, 62, ist Direktor der Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Abteilung des Zentrums für Sozialpolitik an der Universität Bremen. Er war langjähriger Vorsitzender des Sozialbeirates der Bundesregierung.*Der Beitrag basiert zum Teil auf Ausführungen des Verfassers anlässlich der Tagung Wirtschaftliche Potenziale des Alters am 5.7.2004 in Berlin.     

From Adam Smith to the American Catholic bishops: Debating visions of economic life

Considerable controversy was stirred by the contrast between the specific approaches to public policy contained in the first draft of the Catholic bishops' letter on the U.S. economy and the policies favored by the Reagan administration. However, a much more basic contrast actually existed between the bishops' underlying vision of economic life and contemporary capitalism. The pastoral challenges a separation between moral criteria and economic activity that is deeply embedded in modernity itself. Indeed, the splitting off of economic life from its moral-religious matrix is seen by the bishops' critics as a positive, defining feature of democratic capitalism. The critics see the separate economic and moral-religious spheres related by due balance; the bishops, while acknowledging an autonomy to economic life, emphasize that its fundamental choices remain moral. The bishops (and, for different reasons, their critics) have preferred to minimize the contrast between the letter's vision and the contemporary economy. They avoid any clearcut judgment on the economic system by stressing pragmatism and reforms; but implicitly they are granting a strictly conditioned acceptance of reformist capitalism, the condition being the system's openness to questioning and change. Peter Steinfels is Editor of Commonweal Magazine and he is the author of The Neoconservatives (Simon and Schuster, 1979).     

A positive approach to organized consumer action: The “buycott” as an alternative to the boycott

A survey of the consumer research literature revealed few instances of consumer buycotts, i.e., efforts by consumer activists to induce shoppers to buy the products or services of selected companies in order to reward these firms for behavior consistent with the goals of the activists. The few cases did however prompt some thoughts on the development of a conceptual framework for understanding the place of buycotts on a consumer activist agenda. The framework is briefly described and examples presented of prospective uses to be made of buycotts by consumer groups. Also presented is a set of basic research questions concerning buycotts which should be of interest to scholars as well as practitioners.

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Kollektive Konsumentenaktion als positive Rückmeldung: der Buycott als Alternative zum Boycott

Zusammenfassung Eine Durchsicht der Literatur zur Verbraucherforschung zeigt einige wenige Beispiele eines Verbraucher-Buycotts, also der Bemühung von Verbraucheraktivisten, Konsumenten zum Kauf von Produkten solcher Unternehmungen zu bewegen, deren Verhalten den Zielvorstellungen der Aktivisten entspricht und die deswegen belohnt werden sollen. Diese wenigen Fälle geben Anlaß für einige grundsätzliche Überlegungen zur Entwicklung eines konzeptionellen Rahmens für das Verständnis des Buycotts und seiner Bedeutung als möglicher Aktionsparameter der Aktivisten. Der Beitrag skizziert einen solchen Bezugsrahmen und lefert Beispiele für künftige Einsatzmöglichkeiten des Buycotts als Instrument von Verbraucherverbänden. Schließlich werden einige Forschungsfragen formuliert, deren Antwort sowohl für Wissenschaftler wie auch für Praktiker von Interesse sein dürfte.

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Monroe Friedman is a Professor of Psychology at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197, USA.     

Risk Management for E-Cash Systems with Partial Real-Time Audit

We analyze coin-wallet and balance-wallet under partial real-time audit, and compute upper bounds on theft due to the fact that not all the transactions are audited in real time, assuming that everything else is perfect. In particular, we assume that the audit regime holds for innocent payees. Let v be the maximum allowed balance in a wallet, and 01 be the fraction of transactions that are audited in real time in an audit round. Assume one unit transactions. We show that the upper bound on expected theft for coin-wallet is lim₀^–2, while for plausible (similar) parameter choice the bound for a balance-wallet is O(exp(mv)), where 1<m. The former is nicely bounded for small transactions, however, the bound for balance-wallet can become huge in those cases where we require very small false alarm probability. We conclude that partial audit, may be suitable for coin-wallets with low denomination coins, and possibly for balance-wallet, when we may tolerate a relatively high false alarm rate, but it may be too risky for balance-wallet, where very low false alarm rate is required.     

50 Jahre Steuerschätzung: Die Notwendigkeit einer undankbaren Aufgabe

Der vom Bundesministerium der Finanzen im Jahre 1955 eingerichtete Arbeitskreis Steuerschätzungen besteht mittlerweile 50 Jahre und tritt im Mai 2005 in Berlin zu seiner 125. Sitzung zusammen. Was sind die Aufgaben des Arbeitskreises? Mit welchen Problemen muss er sich bei seiner Arbeit auseinandersetzen?Dr. Klaus-Peter Fox, 60, ist Dozent für die Fächer Volkswirtschaftslehre und Finanzwissenschaft an der Fachhochschule für Verwaltung des Saarlandes. Er ist seit Herbst 1983 Mitglied des Arbeitskreises Steuerschätzungen. Er vertritt ausschließlich seine persönliche Meinung.     

Beyond bean counting: Establishing high ethical standards in the public accounting profession

Business professions are increasingly faced with the question of how to best monitor the ethical behavior of their members. Conflicts could exist between a profession's desire to self-regulate and its accountability to the public at large. This study examines how members of one profession, public accounting, evaluate the relative effectiveness of various self-regulatory and externally imposed mechanisms for promoting a climate of high ethical behavior. Specifically, the roles of independent public accountants, regulatory and rule setting agencies, and undergraduate accounting education are investigated. Of 461 possible respondents, 230 questionnaires (a 49.6% response rate) indicated that the profession's own rule setting body (The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) and the use of peer review were perceived as the most effective mechanisms, while government regulation was ranked least. Respondents also evaluated the extent to which ethics should be covered in the accounting curriculum. For every course, the CPAs believed a greater emphasis on ethics is appropriate than presently exists. Suggestions for more effectively integrating ethics into accounting courses are made. Finally, respondents were also asked whether in answering the questionnaire they used a definition of ethics as either the Professional Code of Conduct or a moral and philosphical framework for guiding beliefs. Those who viewed ethics as abiding by a professional code had more confidence in the mechanisms addressed in this study to aid the public accounting profession's ability to ensure high ethical standards of conduct. Methodological implications of this distinction for future studies in business ethics are discussed. Jeffrey R. Cohen is Assistant Professor of Accounting at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a C.M.A. and a Peat Marwick Research Fellow. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Accounting Research, Decision Sciences and The Organizational Behavior Teaching Review. His work on Ethics has appeared in Issues in Accounting Education, Management Accounting, and The CPA Journal. Laurie W. Pant is Assistant Professor of Accounting at Boston College. She holds an M.B.A. and a D.B.A. from Boston University and an M.Ed. from Emory University. She serves on the editorial board of Issues in Accounting Education. Her articles on Ethics have appeared in Issues in Accounting Education, Management Accounting and The Organizational Behavior Teaching Review.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1989 American Accounting Association National Meeting.     

Deception in commercial negotiation

Buyers and sellers of inputs of production, to the degree that they must negotiate directly with each other and cannot have recourse to more impersonal markets, share in certain aspects of bilateral monopoly. Under these circumstances, and assuming profit maximizing goals for each, deception often seems to be an unavoidable characteristic of negotiation.... I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies ... — JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness.     

The Effects of Monetary Magnitude and Level of Aggregation on the Temporal Framing of Price

Existing research has shown that the pennies-a-day strategy of reframing a large aggregate expense as a small daily expense helps to reduce the perceived cost of a transaction (Nagle and Holden, 1995; Price, 1995; Gourville, 1998, 1999). This paper builds on this research and explores the robustness of the phenomenon across two dimensions – (1) the level of temporal aggregation and (2) the dollar magnitude of the transaction. First, we show that the effectiveness of a pennies-a-day strategy is not limited to per-day framing. Rather, we find a more general phenomenon in which a less aggregate expense is preferred to a more aggregate expense, such that if a per-day framing is preferred to a per-year framing, than a per-month framing also will be preferred to a per-year framing. Second, we show that this effectiveness reverses with the magnitude of the underlying expense, such that while a framing of $1 per day is preferred to one of $365 per year, a framing of $4200 per year is preferred to one of $11.50 per day.     

Consumers in transition from the centrally planned economy to the market economy

The article describes the development of consumption and the key consumer policy issues which stem from the transition of Central and East European economies from regimes of central planning to those of market economy. The author analyzes the role of the consumers in the evolution of the communist economies. His conclusion is that maintaining consumption at or below subsistence level (massive starvation was common) was one of the major sources of financing the USSR socialist industrialization under Stalin. This was not possible in the East European people's democracies and, after Stalin's death, in the USSR. Repressed inflation (permanent shortages of consumption goods) and foreign debt became new sources of financing growth in the later stages of the development of the communist economies, a development which caused a permanent disequilibrium leading to negative economic growth and massive popular revolt. The transition to the market economy makes it necessary to address these disequilibrium problems. Two transition strategies are discussed: gradual transition and shock treatment therapy. These strategies give rise to different consumer problems and to different sets of issues facing the consumer movement.

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Konsumenten im Übergang von der Planwirtschaft zur Marktwirtschaft

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag beschreibt, wie sich der private Verbrauch beim Übergang von einer zentral geplanten Wirtschaft zu einer Marktwirtschaft in den osteuropäischen Staaten entwickelt und welche verbraucherpolitischen Aufgaben sich dabei ergeben.Der Autor beschäftigt sich mit der Rolle der Konsumenten in der Entwicklung der kommunistischen Gesellschaften in der UdSSR und in den östlichen Staaten Mitteleuropas. Er kommt zu dem Ergebnis, daß die Begrenzung des Verbrauches auf das Existenzminimum oder auf ein Niveau darunter (massive Hungersnöte waren verbreitet) ursprünglich eine der wichtigsten Quellen war, aus denen das Programm der sozialistischen Industrialisierung in der UdSSR unter Stalin finanziert wurde. Dieses Modell einer industriellen Entwicklung ließ sich in den anderen europäischen kommunistischen Staaten nicht durchführen und war nach Stalins Tod auch in der UdSSR nicht mehr möglich. In der Folgezeit wurden eine unterdrückte Inflation in der Form von dauerhafter Knapphiet von Konsumgütern und wachsende Auslandsschulden neue Quellen für die Finanzierung des industriellen Wachstums — eine Entwicklung, die ihre eigenen Ziele auf Dauer nicht erreichen konnte. Sie führte gegen Ende der 80iger Jahre zu negativen Wachstumsraten, zu massiver Unzufriedenheit in der Bevölkerung, zu sehr ernsthaften Umweltproblemen und zu riesigen Auslandsschulden. Versuche, die kommunistischen Volkswirtschaften zu reformieren ohne Veränderung der politischen und ideologischen Grundlagen, schlugen völlig fehl.Der Beitrag diskutiert zwei Strategien für den Übergang in das neue Wirtschaftssystem. Die eine ist der ungarische Weg eines allmählichen Überganges mit der Fortsetzung der Reformen, die noch unter kommunistischer Herrschaft begonnen wurden, und der allmählichen Öffnung für die Kräfte des Marktes. Die andere ist die polnische Form einer Schocktherapie mit abrupter völliger Öffnung gegenüber den Kräften des Marktes. Beide Strategien führen zu jeweils verschiedenen Verbraucherproblemen mit unterschiedlichen Anforderungen an die Verbraucherpolitik.

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Andrzej K. Kozminski is Professor and Chair of the Department of Management and Organization in the School of Management of Warsaw University, Director of the Warsaw University Postgraduate International Management Center, and President of the International Business School, Nowy Swiat 4, 00-497 Warsaw, Poland.