Climate Negotiations,EITE Industries,and the WTO: Facing the Conflicts

Though developed countries have contributed the lion's share of greenhouse gases to date, developing countries are rapidly catching up – and seem unlikely to adopt meaningful GHG controls in the near term. This prospect concerns major developed countries, since their own GHG controls could cause carbon-intensive production to migrate to unregulated countries, a phenomenon called “carbon leakage.” This article surveys progress in international negotiations to date. It argues that, given the slow pace of efforts to create a global GHG control framework, carbon tariffs and other border measures are likely to be invoked as an alternative means of preventing carbon leakage. The article illustrates the legal and economic pitfalls of border adjustments and urges major emitting countries to suspend the imposition of border measures for a limited time while negotiating a “Code of Good Practice” to guide their trade-related climate measures going forward. The Code that we describe would constrain the scope of border measures and sharply limit their negative consequences.     

Involvement and risk

This paper examines the relationship between product class involvement and the ability to handle purchase risk. Adopting the enduring-instrumental model of involvement, this paper examines its relationship with dimensions of risk such as uncertainty, importance, and innovation proneness. It proposes that enduringly involved consumers have a greater ability to handle risk as compared to instrumentally involved consumers. The findings, based on purchase behavior for the personal computer, food processor, and video cassette recorder, generally support the hypothesized relationships between involvement and risk for each of these three products. The implications of these findings for different facets of information seeking and purchase behavior are discussed.     

The interactive effects of message appeal and individual differences on information processing and persuasion

Individuals differing in the extent to which they enjoy thinking (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) were exposed either to factual or to evaluative messages pertaining to a fictitious automobile. The results show that message appeal moderates the relationship between need for cognition and judgments about the message, whereas beliefs about the product attributes mediate the relationship between message judgments and product evaluations. Theoretical and practical implications of the moderator-mediator distinction are discussed.