How Important is Procedural Justice for Consumer Dispute Resolution? A Case Study of an Ombudsman Model for European Consumers

Recent EU legislation has mandated the extension of comprehensive coverage of consumer dispute resolution (CDR) throughout the EU. The extension of CDR has given rise to a range of questions about the theoretical and practical implications of these changes. The field of CDR is underexplored in academic literature and only a few studies provide an overview of this rapidly developing area. There is a need to base CDR schemes on empirical evidence to inform practice and to provide justice. Tyler’s procedural justice model of public compliance with the law might be beneficial in this inquiry. This exploratory study tests whether Tyler’s well-established normative model of social regulation holds true in the CDR context by applying it to the ombudsman. In doing so, this paper seeks to contribute to a richer understanding of how to assess consumer acceptance of an ombudsman model of CDR. The study finds that Tyler’s model cannot be fully translated to the UK ombudsman case study. The current dearth of comparative empirical evidence on the effectiveness of CDR in Europe fuels the need for further inquiry and re-evaluation of its theoretical foundations.     

Towards Understanding User Perceptions of a Tourist-based Environmental Monitoring System: An Exploratory Case Study

This paper examines user perceptions of a tourist-based environmental monitoring system which supports park visitor engagement with the environmental monitoring of specific sites within two National and one Regional Park in Victoria, Australia. The system allows park visitors (tourists) to actively participate in the care and management of the park by voluntarily contributing to web-based photographic records. The primary objective of this exploratory case study research is to identify who the tourist users are, their perceptions of the system, their motivation for using it, and the benefits that they perceive are derived from using the system. The study found that respondents indicated a strong concern for the environment and appreciated the simplicity of the system and the on-going connection it provides to the park-management process. Importantly, respondents found the system to be a valuable source of engagement with the environmental monitoring and management process.     

Initial Impressions Determine Behaviours: Morality Predicts the Willingness to Help Newcomers

Prior research has demonstrated the impact of morality (vs. competence) information for impression formation. This study examines behavioral implications of people’s initial impressions based on information about their morality vs. competence in a workplace. School teachers and employees (N = 79) were asked to form an impression of a new school manager (i.e. a prospective boss), who was presented as High vs. Low in Morality and High vs. Low in Competence. Results showed that morality information rather than competence information determined initial emotional responses to the new manager, which mediated willingness to help the newcomer adjust in task and social contexts. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications and future research directions are outlined.     

Location in a congested city

This paper analyzes optimal location decisions in a city where both residential and employment locations are endogenously determined. A model is constructed which includes both traffic congestion among commuters and colocational externalities among firms. The model establishes that if location tax of the kind discussed by Koopmans and Beckman is imposed on both residential and employee locations, the private decisions of households and firms will produce an optimal pattern of location.     

Models of water market mechanisms and an illustrative application to the Middle East

The growing demand by countries in the eastern Mediterranean over the waters of the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers, and the highly depleted coastal and mountain groundwater reservoirs, raise the need to explore ways and means to ameliorate existing and expected water scarcity. Economists have for some time proposed ways towards more efficient exploitation of existing water supplies, specifically by employing market incentive mechanisms in order to encourage voluntary water sharing among countries and regions. Such trading schemes may involve two or more countries. It can be shown that such schemes — given any initial assignment of property claims to water resources — can often lead to increases in the welfare of the countries concerned.The paper proposes two specific mechanisms for international markets in water claims in the eastern Mediterranean region, in which parties voluntarily engage in such trades, as they would expect to gain real benefits from these transactions. Simulation exercises with real data show that — as is true for any opening of markets to international trade — that all parties in the region might benefit to a greater or lesser degree from auctions of water.     

The incidence of congestion and congestion tolls

In contrast with the enormous literature on efficiency aspects of congestion tolls, very little has appeared on their equity implications. Simulation is applied to a standard urban model to learn about the distributional aspects of an optimal toll, or the absence of one. Tolls are found to produce distributional changes which may overshadow their effects on allocative efficiency. In passing, the model is used to demonstrate that lagged supply adjustments to increases in the demand for suburban housing may be an effective, if second-best, alternative to congestion tolls.     

An examination of materialism,conspicuous consumption and gender differences

This paper examines gender differences in terms of materialism, conspicuous consumption, brand loyalty and impulse buying. We build our hypotheses based on both existing marketing and consumption literature with an additional integration of historical and gender studies literature in order to further augment the study of materialism and its related variables. Our study used survey data from 1180 Americans living in four northeastern states. Results show that significant differences between the genders were found in terms of materialism, conspicuous consumption and impulse buying. No significant difference was found in terms of brand loyalty.     

The pricing of conservative accounting and the measurement of conservatism at the firm-year level

This paper analyzes the relation between equity prices and conditional conservatism and introduces a new measure of conservatism at the firm-year level. We show that the asymmetric properties of conservative accounting, the existence of non-accounting sources of information, and the properties of GAAP related to special items combine to generate a nonlinear relation between unexpected equity returns and earnings news (the shock to expected current and future earnings). Based on this model, we construct a conservatism ratio (CR) defined as the ratio of the current earnings shock to earnings news. CR measures the proportion of the total shock to expected current and future earnings recognized in current year earnings. Ranking firms according to CR, we show empirically that higher CR firms have more leverage, increased volatility of returns, more incidence of losses, more negative accruals, and increased volatility of earnings and accruals, consistent with the literature on conservative accounting.