Employment Opportunities for Consumer Affairs Professionals

This analysis of consumer affairs professionals in business and government describes what functions they perform, where they are employed, what education and experience is required and what their salaries are. Professional educators in the consumer field have generally ignored the career field of consumer affairs professional. Colleges and universities train consumer majors to be educators, researchers, or extension workers, but little attention is paid to the education of consumer affairs professionals for business and government. This article not only attempts to give educators in the consumer field a greater awareness of this relatively new career so that they can develop educational programs more intelligently but also attempts to make business and government more aware of what is being done in this area so they may be able to utilize the talents of consumer affairs professionals.     

Preliminary Assessment of Changes in Labels Required by the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990

This paper describes a study that assesses some changes in nutrition labels resulting from provisions of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 (NLEA). Type of nutrition label, nutritional value, and presence (absence) of a nutrition “warning” are tested in a between subjects experimental design. Results indicate that additional nutrition information recommended by the NLEA can significantly affect nutrition attitudes, perceptions, and self-reported product purchase likelihood.     

Consumer Interest Litigation: A Case Study of Nader v. Allegheny Airlines

The Nader case highlights the related problems of airline “overbooking” and passenger “no shows,” and raises the question of what public policy should be in this area. The paper analyzes the efficiency and equity aspects of Nader's attempt to eliminate overbooking. It also focuses attention on the interplay of litigation and regulation as instruments of economic policy change.     

When Will Mean-Variance Efficient Portfolios Be Well Diversified?

We characterize the conditions under which efficient portfolios put small weights on individual assets. These conditions bound mean returns with measures of average absolute covariability between assets. The bounds clarify the relationship between linear asset pricing models and well-diversified efficient portfolios. We argue that the extreme weightings in sample efficient portfolios are due to the dominance of a single factor in equity returns. This makes it easy to diversify on subsets to reduce residual risk, while weighting the subsets to reduce factor risk simultaneously. The latter involves taking extreme positions. This behavior seems unlikely to be attributable to sampling error.