Making connections: Partner quality, identity, and community

The study of equine companion ship and horse ownership provides an opportunity to explore the constructs of partner quality, identity projects, and consumer community.     

Understanding attributes affecting meal choice decisions in a bundling context

This study examined attributes that contribute to consumer meal choice decisions within a prix fixe menu. Drawing on typologies of consumer purchase behavior, factors potentially influencing consumers’ meal choice are identified and empirically tested. The results showed that consumers consider value for price as the most important consideration for their meal bundle choices. The results also indicated that familiar and healthy foods also contribute to the selection process. However, consumers tend to avoid the risk of choosing new menu items.     

How sensitive are consumer expenditures to retail energy prices?

There is growing evidence that the primary effect of energy price shocks on the U.S. economy involves a reduction in consumer spending. We quantify the direct effect on real consumption of unanticipated changes in discretionary income, shifts in precautionary savings, and changes in the operating cost of energy-using durables. The possibility of asymmetries in the response of real consumption to energy price shocks is also considered. We demonstrate that linear models are consistent with the symmetric behavior of real consumption in 1979 (when energy prices increased sharply) and in 1986 (when they fell sharply). It is shown that historically energy price shocks have been an important factor in explaining U.S. real consumption growth, but by no means the dominant factor.     

Ideological maps of consumer education

The case is made for the merit of discovering and owning the ideological and paradigmatic underpinnings of consumer‐related education initiatives. After briefly profiling two camps of dominant and contending/emergent world views (ideologies and attendant paradigms), two ideological maps of consumer education are developed and applied, providing a scaffold for future deliberations about the import of world views in consumer education.     

开放条件下的R＆D与比较优势的动态变化

文章探讨了比较优势实现动态变化的路径问题，并着重讨论专业化的研发投入（R＆D）对比较实现动态变化的影响，认为绝对的研发效率是比较优势实现动态转化的条件。在此基础上，讨论了动态比较优势与福利增长之间的关系，结论表明，比较优势实现动态变化对于保证福利水平的长期增长来说是必不可少的。     

The impact of external reference price on consumer price expectations

Comparative pricing practices are frequently used where actual product prices are accompanied by higher external reference prices. All types of stores, regular-price department stores as well as discount stores, use comparative price claims to frame price deals as attractive [Marketing Science 4 (1985) 199]. In this paper, a quadratic model is specified for the impact of external reference price (ERP) on consumer price expectations. Based on the research on communication discrepancy and advertising claim discrepancy, which in turn draw on assimilation-contrast, attribution, and prospect theories, we hypothesize a quadratic effect of external reference prices on consumer price expectations. An interactive, computer-controlled experiment using multiple levels of ERP is used to estimate the proposed model. As hypothesized, support for an inverted U-shape relationship is found between consumers’ updated price expectations and the difference between ERP and initial price expectations. That is, as the difference between ERP and subjects’ initial price expectations increases, subjects’ updated price expectations increase to a point and then start to decrease. We find that the fit of the quadratic model specification for the effect of external reference price on price expectations is noticeably superior to that of linear, logarithmic, square root, and S-shaped specifications. Finally, we provide implications of our results for both retail managers and for regulatory authorities alike.     

Service provider responses to anxious and angry customers: different challenges, different payoffs

Anxiety and anger, two frequently experienced emotions during service consumption, arise from different appraisals of the eliciting event, i.e., attribution to uncontrollable circumstances and low coping potential for anxiety versus attribution to providers and high coping potential for anger. These appraisal differences were hypothesized to impact the occurrence of supportive provider responses (higher for anxiety than for anger), and the value given to supportive responses by anxious versus angry customers (higher evaluation for anxiety than for anger). It was also hypothesized that, although evaluation of provider response would mediate the relationship between the intensity of both anger and anxiety and satisfaction with the service encounter as a whole, the power of this mediating effect would be stronger for anxiety than for anger. Hypotheses were confirmed in a survey of air travel passengers reporting episodes of anxiety and anger. Implications of these results for challenges and payoffs involved in the development of adaptive response strategies to anxious and angry customers are discussed.     

Consumer perceptions of refund depth and competitive scope in price-matching guarantees: effects on store patronage

The study investigates the effect of two characteristics of price-matching guarantees—the depth of refund offer and the scope of competitors eligible for price matching—on consumer perceptions of price-matching guarantee believability and value and consumer intentions to patronize the retailer. The results show that large refund offers built consumer patronage intentions by enhancing perceptions of the value of the price-matching guarantee, while simultaneously exerting a negative impact on patronage by reducing believability of the price-matching promise. The competitive scope also affected the patronage intentions by influencing the perceived value of the price-matching policy.     

Brand competition in CPG industries: Sustaining large local advantages with little product differentiation

In direct competition between national brands of consumer packaged goods (CPG), one brand often has a large local share advantage over the other despite the similarity of the branded products. I present an explanation for these large and persistent advantages in the context of local competition on perceived quality or brand image. The main result of the analysis is a relation between varying degrees of product similarity and equilibrium outcomes of local share advantages. Namely, I find that asymmetric quality positioning and associated local share advantages emerge especially when competing brands are objectively similar. Conversely, local share asymmetries based on brand positioning occur less when brands are dissimilar. This paper provides two reinforcing intuitions for this result. First, if brands are objectively similar, different levels of investment in local quality perceptions co-exist in equilibrium in the same market, because this investment is often borne as fixed cost. Also, early movers will invest in high perceived quality, whereas late movers have less incentive to invest because of demand sharing and increased price competition. Second, if the local advantages are shared by competitors across markets, the persistence of these advantages is reinforced by multimarket contact. Even when local brand building is free, firms may not want to improve perceived quality in their “weak” markets if it initiates retaliation by the competition in their “strong” markets. The increase in multimarket profits from collusion is large when the products are similar, because price competition looms large.

The 99 price ending as a signal of a low-price appeal

There is evidence that the rightmost digits, or endings, of retail prices can communicate meanings to consumers. To better understand how such meanings are formed, this paper addresses the question of how the 99 price ending can have a low-price meaning even though 99-ending prices tend to be higher rather than lower competitive prices. Analysis of two large samples of newspaper price advertising indicates that there is a strong and robust correlation between the use of the 99 price ending and the presence of a low-price appeal such as a claimed discount. It is suggested that the salience of price advertising leads it to dominate other sources of information in the consumer's learning of price-ending meanings.