Purpose
The Italian legislature GAVE to the Italian Competition Authority has an increasingly prominent role for the consumer protection over the years, especially giving the possibility to impose ...fines against companies. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the Italian system of consumer protection, studying the impact of these fines on the Italian agrifood companies till 2012.
Design/methodology/approach
Grounded theory approach was used in order to formulate new hypothesis from emerging data. Information and data were collected through several sources: interviews with key informants of ICA, secondary data from ICA database, a survey run among companies that received a penalty from ICA during the period 2007-2012, companies website, LexisNexis database and National print and web media titles.
Findings
From the analysis it emerges that there is an accurate system planned for avoiding and limiting misleading practices. Firms in fact have been capable to adapt to the set of imposed rules and to reduce the efficacy of the proposed dissuasive system.
Originality/value
The originality of this study regards the way in which the consumer protection was investigated, in fact it takes into account the relationships between ICA and IAP, two of the most important players of consumer protection in Italy. Moreover, the study is focussed on the agrifood sector. The authors give some recommendations for future interventions focussing on the length of time of the process, which could have a positive impact on the effectiveness of sanctions.
This paper examines the impact of competition, brand equity, and the cost of overstating quality on optimal quality and quality claims of new products. We consider two firms simultaneously ...introducing a new product and making one-time decisions about its quality, price, and advertised quality. Using a two period model which allows for larger weight on future period sales, we find competition often leads firms to overstate quality unless they are constrained by high legal costs imposed by regulations or third-party legal action. More interesting, when competitors are constrained to be truthful in their advertising due to legal or other costs, optimal product quality can be lower and profits can be higher.
Pro-life pregnancy centers have been criticized for attracting clients through false or misleading marketing and, once clients are through the door, for presenting false or misleading—or at least ...incomplete—information. A common contemporary means of regulating pregnancy centers is through statutes that require pregnancy centers to give notice that their services are not comprehensive. In 2018, in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, the Supreme Court held that California’s version of such a disclosure statute likely amounted to compelled speech impermissible under the First Amendment.
This Note argues that, separate from their constitutional validity, disclosure requirements are not necessarily the panacea that pro-choice advocates want them to be. Early attempts to regulate pregnancy centers relied on existing false advertising and unfair business practices statutes to prohibit pregnancy centers from engaging in misleading marketing that suggested the centers offered services they did not. When those suits were successful, the resulting injunctive relief often resembled contemporary notice regimes—and so is vulnerable to the same critiques. Both regulatory schemes are addressed primarily to pregnancy centers’ deceptive marketing practices and do little to remedy the misinformation that awaits women inside pregnancy centers’ doors. Furthermore, transparency literature teaches that even as to this narrow goal, disclosure-type regulation may be ineffective: Critiques of the efficacy of mandated disclosure as a regulatory tool generally likely apply with special force in the context of pregnancy centers.
When viewing advertisements, consumers must decide what to believe and what is meant to deceive. Accordingly, much behavioral research has explored strategies and outcomes of how consumers process ...persuasive messages that vary in perceived sincerity. New neuroimaging methods enable researchers to augment this knowledge by exploring the cognitive mechanisms underlying such processing. The current study collects neuroimaging data while participants are exposed to advertisements with differing levels of perceived message deceptiveness (believable, moderately deceptive, and highly deceptive). The functional magnetic resonance imaging data, combined with an additional behavioral study, offer evidence of two noteworthy results. First, confirming multistage frameworks of persuasion, the authors observe two distinct stages of brain activity: (1) precuneus activation at earlier stages and (2) superior temporal sulcus and temporal-parietal junction activation at later stages. Second, the authors observe disproportionately greater brain activity associated with claims that are moderately deceptive than those that are either believable or highly deceptive. These results provoke new thinking about what types of claims garner consumer attention and which consumers may be particularly vulnerable to deceptive advertising.
Advertising is a form of marketing communication which has become an integral and important part of business today. Marketers are spending great amount of budget on marketing and major portion of it ...is spent on advertisements. In country like India, there is a huge market potential which provides lot of opportunities for marketers but at the same time marketers are facing challenges to break the clutter of advertising. Each seller is under endless pressure to make profit and to survive in this highly competitive market. In this process, many a times marketers deliberately lure the customers by such statements and assurance which cannot beaccomplished and deceive the customers. Here theyviolate customer's elementary right of expecting factual and valid information from seller. As the objective of advertisement is not only to inform but also to persuade the customers, the responsibility of advertisers increases a lot. This article explores and explains the concept and objectives of advertisement, concept and techniques of deceptive advertisements, laws related to advertisement in India and agencies operating in India for regulation of advertisements.
This paper illustrates how labelling claims of a testosterone booster supplement mislead consumers. The labelling claims misappropriate scientific terminology, exaggerate and misrepresent research as ...evidence for the product’s purported efficacy.
This paper theoretically and empirically engages the relationship between organizational identity and deception using the market for early jazz recordings as a setting. In this setting, pseudonyms ...(where a recording is reissued under a fictitious name) were used deceptively as a way to preserve a firm's identity while selling profitable but identity-threatening products to the mass market. Firms founded in the Victorian Era actively sought alignment with the cultural elite and used pseudonyms to deceive observers into believing that their production of cultural products was consistent with their Victorian Era identity. In effect, pseudonyms allowed these firms to decouple their position in identity space from their position in product space by inflating production of identity-preserving products. Using product data from jazz discographies, record company directories, and record advertisements in major U.S. newspapers, we provide strong empirical evidence that Victorian Era firms were active in using pseudonyms to preserve their identities.
In the information economy, sellers can distort the truth about their products, and online intermediaries have incentives to skew the facts they provide to buyers. Mark Patterson discusses ways data ...can be manipulated for competitive advantage and consumer exploitation, and shows how courts can apply antitrust law to address these problems.
Investigates the accuracy of labelling (as determined through analysis of fatty acid composition) and health claims of fish oil supplements sold in NZ, as well as the products' hazards (eg, mercury ...content). Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
El engaño en la publicidad es una práctica que ha ido en aumento para lograr la venta de productos y servicios e implica un asunto ético. El objetivo del presente trabajo fue examinar la relación del ...escepticismo en la publicidad del “Buen Fin” y la percepción de engaño en dicha publicidad y su efecto en la actitud hacia la misma, la credibilidad en los anuncios y la intención de compra de los millennials. Se realizó una investigación cuantitativa, explicativa y transversal a 392 millennials radicados en la Ciudad de México. Los resultados mostraron que, efectivamente, el escepticismo en la publicidad del “Buen Fin” incrementará la percepción de engaño en la misma y ambos parámetros influirán negativamente en forma indirecta en la intención de compra, ya que la confiabilidad en el producto queda en duda.
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