Based on a series of pathbreaking lectures given at Yale University in 2012, this powerful, thought-provoking work by national best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein combines legal theory with ...behavioral economics to make a fresh argument about the legitimate scope of government, bearing on obesity, smoking, distracted driving, health care, food safety, and other highly volatile, high-profile public issues. Behavioral economists have established that people often make decisions that run counter to their best interests-producing what Sunstein describes as "behavioral market failures." Sometimes we disregard the long term; sometimes we are unrealistically optimistic; sometimes we do not see what is in front of us. With this evidence in mind, Sunstein argues for a new form of paternalism, one that protects people against serious errors but also recognizes the risk of government overreaching and usually preserves freedom of choice.Against those who reject paternalism of any kind, Sunstein shows that "choice architecture"-government-imposed structures that affect our choices-is inevitable, and hence that a form of paternalism cannot be avoided. He urges that there are profoundly moral reasons to ensure that choice architecture is helpful rather than harmful-and that it makes people's lives better and longer.
Highlighting the important role of marketing in encouraging sustainable consumption, the current research presents a review of the academic literature from marketing and behavioral science that ...examines the most effective ways to shift consumer behaviors to be more sustainable. In the process of the review, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing and encouraging sustainable consumer behavior change. The framework is represented by the acronym SHIFT, and it proposes that consumers are more inclined to engage in pro-environmental behaviors when the message or context leverages the following psychological factors: Social influence, Habit formation, Individual self, Feelings and cognition, and Tangibility. The authors also identify five broad challenges to encouraging sustainable behaviors and use these to develop novel theoretical propositions and directions for future research. Finally, the authors outline how practitioners aiming to encourage sustainable consumer behaviors can use this framework.
The environmentally conscious consumption of fashion products promotes the preservation of natural ecosystems for current and future generations. It may include the purchasing and use of textile ...products made from organic and sustainable materials, the repair, reuse and recycling of textile products, and the concept of slow fashion. The environmental aspects of fashion products have drawn the attention of both researchers and practitioners in recent years. As a result, many scientific papers have accumulated regarding this vital aspect of consumer behaviour. This paper aims to provide an overview of the literature regarding consumer behaviour toward green fashion products, as well as to uncover and categorise significant driving factors, and in addition, identify the most critical barriers. After identifying the relevant literature, the study examines 104 articles published between 2011 to 2021 in high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Our results demonstrate that while most of the reviewed articles employ a quantitative survey questionnaire method to identify the drivers of green textile consumption, qualitative approaches are also used. Most authors utilise the theory of planned behaviour as a foundation of their research. This paper summarises the research problems covered by the selected articles, the theoretical frameworks, the methods used, and their essential findings. We also outline existing research gaps and suggest potential directions for future research. Since there are only a few review articles on green fashion consumption, our article provides an important new addition to the literature for the reference of future scholars.
This research examines customer engagement in social media (CESM) using a meta-analytic model of 814 effect sizes across 97 studies involving 161,059 respondents. Findings reveal that customer ...engagement is driven by satisfaction, positive emotions, and trust, but not by commitment. Satisfaction is a stronger predictor of customer engagement in high (vs. low) convenience, B2B (vs. B2C), and Twitter (vs. Facebook and Blogs). Twitter appears twice as likely as other social media platforms to improve customer engagement via satisfaction and positive emotions. Customer engagement is also found to have substantial value for companies, directly impacting firm performance, behavioral intention, and word-of-mouth. Moreover, hedonic consumption yields nearly three times stronger customer engagement to firm performance effects vis-à-vis utilitarian consumption. However, contrary to conventional managerial wisdom, word-of-mouth does not improve firm performance nor does it mediate customer engagement effects on firm performance. Contributions to customer engagement theory, including an embellishment of the customer engagement mechanics definition, and practical implications for managers are discussed.
This book addresses the rapidly changing citizen roles in innovation, technology adoption, intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building for low-carbon solutions. It links research in ...innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and science and technology studies, and builds a new approach for the study of user contributions to innovation and sociotechnical change. Citizen Activities in Energy Transition gives detailed and empirically grounded overall appraisal of citizens’ active technological engagement in the current energy transition, in an era when Internet connectivity has given rise to important new forms of citizen communities and interactions. It elaborates a new way to study users in sociotechnical change through long-term ethnographic and historical research and reports its deployment in a major, decade-long line of investigation on user activities in small-scale renewables, addressing user contributions from the early years to the late proliferation stages of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs). It offers a much-needed empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the activities in which users are engaged over the course of sociotechnical change, including innovation, adoption, adjustment, intermediation, community building, digital communities, market creation, and legitimacy creation. This work is a must-read for those seeking to understand the role of users in innovation, energy systems change and the significance of new digital communities in present and future sociotechnical change. Academics, policymakers, and managers are given a new resource to understand the "demand side" of sociotechnical change beyond the patterns of investment, adoption, and social acceptance that have traditionally occupied their attention.
The concept of brand activism has recently gained in importance. Nevertheless, theoretically sound studies that address the impact of brand activism are still rare in many areas. This is especially ...the case with regard to the meaning of brand activism for consumer participation in the context of sustainable consumption. This article focuses on this research gap by using a model developed in the social sciences to derive and empirically test various hypotheses. The results show that brand activism can have an effect on some constructs associated with consumer participation, but that this differs according to brand type and context. However, a direct effect of brand activism on consumer participation could not be found. Companies that intend to instrumentalize the concept of brand activism should take this differentiated effect into account.
Das Konzept Markenaktivismus hat in letzter Zeit an Bedeutung gewonnen. Gleichwohl fehlt es an vielen Stellen noch an theoretisch fundierten Studien, die die Wirkung von Markenaktivismus adressieren. Dies gilt insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Bedeutung von Markenaktivismus für die Verbraucherteilhabe im Kontext des nachhaltigen Konsums. Diese Forschungslücke fokussiert der vorliegende Beitrag, in dem mit Hilfe eines in den Sozialwissenschaften entwickelten Modells verschiedene Hypothesen abgeleitet und empirisch getestet werden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Markenaktivismus zwar einen Einfluss auf einige mit der Verbraucherteilhabe assoziierte Konstrukte haben kann, dieser sich allerdings nach Markentyp und Kontext unterscheidet. Ein direkter Effekt von Markenaktivismus auf die Verbraucherteilhabe konnte allerdings nicht festgestellt werden. Unternehmen die das Konzept des Markenaktivismus instrumentalisieren wollen, sollten diese differenzierte Wirkung berücksichtigen.
Even as they see their wages go down and their buying power decrease, many parents are still putting their kids' material desires first. These parents struggle with how to handle children's consumer ...wants, which continue unabated despite the economic downturn. And, indeed, parents and other adults continue to spend billions of dollars on children every year. Why do children seem to desire so much, so often, so soon, and why do parents capitulate so readily? To determine what forces lie behind the onslaught of Nintendo Wiis and Bratz dolls, Allison J. Pugh spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. In Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Pugh teases out the complex factors that contribute to how we buy, from lunchroom conversations about Game Boys to the stark inequalities facing American children. Pugh finds that children's desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their yearning to join the conversation at school or in the neighborhood. Most parents respond to children's need to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as passports in children's social worlds, because they sympathize with their children's fear of being different from their peers. Even under financial constraints, families prioritize children "feeling normal". Pugh masterfully illuminates the surprising similarities in the fears and hopes of parents and children from vastly different social contexts, showing that while corporate marketing and materialism play a part in the commodification of childhood, at the heart of the matter is the desire to belong.
This book boldly unsettles the idea of globalization as a recent phenomenon—and one driven solely by Western interests—by offering a compelling new perspective on global interconnectivity in the ...nineteenth century. Jeremy Prestholdt examines East African consumers' changing desires for material goods from around the world in an era of sweeping social and economic change. Exploring complex webs of local consumer demands that affected patterns of exchange and production as far away as India and the United States, the book challenges presumptions that Africa's global relationships have always been dictated by outsiders. Full of rich and often-surprising vignettes that outline forgotten trajectories of global trade and consumption, it powerfully demonstrates how contemporary globalization is foreshadowed in deep histories of intersecting and reciprocal relationships across vast distances.
Conventional economic theory assumes that consumers are fully rational, that they have well-defined preferences and easily understand the market environment. Yet, in fact, consumers may have ...inconsistent, context-dependent preferences, or simply not enough brain-power to evaluate and compare complicated products. Thus the standard model of consumer behavior-which depends on an ideal market in which consumers are boundlessly rational--is called into question. While behavioral economists have for some time confirmed and characterized these inconsistencies, the logical next step is to examine the implications they have in markets. Grounded in key observations in consumer psychology, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization develops non-standard models of "boundedly rational" consumer behavior and embeds them into familiar models of markets. It then rigorously analyses each model in the tradition of microeconomic theory, leading to a richer, more realistic picture of consumer behavior. Ran Spiegler analyses phenomena such as exploitative price plans in the credit market, complexity of financial products and other obfuscation practices, consumer antagonism to unexpected price increases, and the role of default options in consumer decision making. Spiegler unifies the relevant literature into three main strands: limited ability to anticipate and control future choices, limited ability to understand complex market environments, and sensitivity to reference points. Although the challenge of enriching the psychology of decision makers in economic models has been at the frontier of theoretical research in the last decade, there has been no graduate-level, theory-oriented textbook to cover developments in the last 10-15 years. Thus, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization offers a welcome and crucial new understanding of market behavior-it challenges conventional wisdom in ways that are interesting and economically significant, and which in the end effect the well-being of all market participants. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/9780195398717/toc.html