One strike and you're out: Qualitative insights into the formation of consumers' ethical company or brand perceptions

Drawing on 20 long interviews (McCracken, 1988) with general consumers, this research suggests that the impact of various kinds of un/ethical business practices of a given company on consumers' perceived ethicality (CPE) is asymmetrical. The resulting taxonomy identifies three distinct dimensions of varying directions and impacts on CPE, with the personal interest of the evaluating person moderating and mediating the dimensions' slopes: (1) Monovalent ethical dissatisfiers which have a negative effect; (2) Bivalent ethical dis/satisfiers that either favorably or unfavorably influence ethical perceptions, commensurate with a company's efforts; and (3) Monovalent ethical satisfiers, capable of generating a positive impact. The achievement of positive CPE appears highly challenging for a variety of reasons identified. Only one instance of perceived misconduct can be sufficient to contaminate a company/brand's CPE, despite otherwise exemplary behavioral records or altruistic engagement. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for managers and academics.     

Consumer education and everyday futures work

The purpose of this article is to draft new tasks for consumer education in a transformed and transforming world and consumption situation. The basic claim is that consumer education needs to become empowering or emancipatory, and that this can be reached through emphasizing the futures aspect and skills concerning everyday futures work. The functions of traditional consumer education can be described as socializative, preventive and corrective. This is not enough in a rapidly changing world in which consumers face completely new challenges. Section 2 of this article studies changes focal to the individual consumer. In Section 3 I define the basic functions of a household as an economic unit, consumption and consumer education. In Section 4 I continue the analysis of the functions of consumer education with the help of the neologism everyday futures work, which is grounded on the application of Joseph Nuttin's theory of action. I also argue that to fulfill an empowering function, consumer education has to emphasize the futures aspect. The core concept here is futures-will, which highlights the dynamic character of human action. In Section 5 I suggest relevant solutions for consumer education in relation to the challenges and functions of consumption described above as well as explain how the enhancing of everyday futures work skills could be applied in the framework of the cycle of human action. I conclude the article by discussing some recent topics in consumer education to show that consumer education thinking is in some measure - even if not often explicitly expressed - converging with futures education.     

促进农村消费信贷良性发展

<国民经济和社会发展十二五规划纲要>明确把扩大消费需求作为扩大内需的战略重点,而发展农村消费信贷又是扩大农村消费的重要支撑.本文对消费信贷在我国的发展现状和存在的问题进行了分析,研究提出了促进消费信贷良性发展的对策.     

国外金融消费者保护发展及启示

本文在分析比较美国、英国、新加坡和日本等国金融消费者保护发展现状的基础上,指出我国面临着金融消费者法律法规不健全、公众金融知识匮乏、金融机构和行业自律机制尚不健全等问题。鉴此,本文提出推进金融消费者保护法制建设、界定金融消费者保护范围、强化金融消费者教育、规范市场交易行为、完善金融消费者保护的动态机制等政策建议。     

SOCIAL SAVINGS

Abstract ‘Social savings’ is a cliometric concept to measure the benefit to society of technological improvements. The terms are defined, and the relationship between social savings and consumer surplus, total factor productivity and growth accounting measures is discussed. We critically outline Fogel's original application of social savings to American railroads in 1890, before looking at subsequent uses of the concept, both to other transport improvements and to other technological changes more generally. The paper concludes by setting out areas to which social savings could be applied, as well as setting out guidelines that future economic historians should use when applying the technique, in order to maximize the likely usefulness of any such work.     

The historical development of the consumption of sweeteners - a learning approach

From a theoretical point of view, addressing the adoption of novelty and change in consumption is a topic of major interest since it challenges the axiomatic foundations of modern microeconomics. Starting from the “continuity hypothesis” which considers the evolution of culture to be based on biological evolution, an evolutionary approach is presented which highlights the role of consumer learning. By means of a case study on the complex consumption history of sweeteners, it is shown that this approach complements the Lancasterian characteristics approach to the adoption of novelty in consumption in a fruitful way.JEL Classification: B52, D11, D12, Q13The author thanks Guido Buenstorf, Klaus Rathe and Ulrich Witt for helpful discussions and comments.     

Explaining the impact of consumer religiosity,perceived risk and moral potency on purchase intentions

The role of religion has been overlooked as an antecedent to risk perception, as has moral potency, when purchasing religiously sensitive products. The aim of this study is to demonstrate how perceived risk and moral potency explain the impact of shopper religiosity on purchasing religiously-questionable products from retailers. A conceptual model was tested on a sample of 271 respondents, elucidating the complex relationships between religiosity, social and psychological risk, moral potency and purchase intention. The model offers a strong psychological explanation of how a shopper's religion may increase their perceptions of risk and personal responsibility, confidence and courage, which subsequently impact purchase intentions. Retail managers may choose to implement this model to better predict shopper adoption behaviour of new religiously-questionable products. The model allows for future empirical examinations across multiple shopping contexts and may be employed to estimate levels of demand for new products based on the extent of religiosity, moral potency and risk.     

A two-stage model for forecasting consumers’ intention to purchase with e-coupons

E-coupons (electronic coupons) have been a mainstay of online marketing to attract consumers and promote them to repeat purchase, distributing right e-coupons to right consumers is of critical importance. In big data era, analyzing consumers preferences for e-coupons by their online behavior and the impact of data imbalance caused by low active consumers are rarely studied. Thus, we propose a two-stage hybrid model. Firstly, consumer segmentation is implemented to analyze behavioral characteristics for each segment and distinguish low active consumers, then models are constructed for different consumer segments. The proposed model is applied to a real online consumption data. Consumers are aggregated into four segments: potential e-coupons user, low discount sensitive user, high discount sensitive user (including discount preference and fixed preference). The first one is defined as low active consumer segment and others are high active consumer segments. Isolation forest model and logistic regression model are respectively constructed for them. Result shows that data imbalance is effectively relieved, prediction performance is also significantly better than the traditional approaches. Finally, e-coupons’ usage characteristics for each consumer segment are summarized, according to that, companies can increase sales and improve consumer satisfaction as well.