Cost-effectively decarbonising the power sector and household energy use using variable renewable energy will require that electricity consumption becomes much more flexible and responsive to ...constraints in supply and the distribution network. In recent years residential demand response (DR) has received increasing attention that has sought to answer, based on current evidence, questions about how much consumers will engage with DR.
This paper critically reviews the evidence base for residential consumer engagement with DR and draws out several important limitations in it. We argue for a more action-oriented focus on developing practical strategies to enable and unlock greater loadshifting and consumer engagement with DR within a changing technology and regulatory context. A number of recommendations are put forward for accelerating UK consumer engagement with DR, presented under three broad strategies: (a) promote awareness of smart tariffs, smart meters and storage and automation behind-the-meter devices as mutually-supportive components within a common ‘DR technology cluster’; (b) deliver targeted support for adoption of electric vehicles and other storage and automation technologies; (c) enable and support informed adoption of DR-enabling products and services through ‘smarter’ digital comparison tools (DCTs), data portability, and faster, simpler switching.
The interdependency between components within this DR technology cluster delivers efficiency but also poses a risk that one delayed component (e.g., smart metering) will hold-up policy and industry support for other components. The urgency of decarbonisation goals makes it necessary to push forward as many of these elements as possible rather than the pace being set by the slowest.
•Findings and limitations of the evidence base for residential DR are drawn out.•Smart meters, TOU and smart storage should be promoted as a DR ‘technology cluster’.•Support EV adoption to drive greater engagement with smart meters and DR.•Enable adoption of DR products and services with smarter Digital Comparison Tools.•Support for each element of the DR technology cluster should be urgently pursued.
The reference price, used by consumers to evaluate market prices, has tremendous relevance in dynamic pricing. Reconciling current heterogeneous theories and studies on reference prices, this paper ...analyzes the impact of hotel price sequences on consumers’ reference prices through a lab and a field experiment. Experiment 1 tests the importance of retrospective price evaluations, while Experiment 2 evaluates the impact of three forms of competition: (i) simultaneous behavior, where firms adjust prices simultaneously; (ii) leader–follower behavior, where one firm acts as the leader; and (iii) independent behavior, where each player takes its rival's strategy as given and seeks to maximize its own profits. The results show that consumers decrease their reference price when competing hotels adjust their prices simultaneously. Relevant managerial implications are drawn for the hospitality industry, which is affected by the presence of online travel agencies that announce the daily rates offered by each competitor.
Furniture is an item that is intended for households and can beautify a room, because of the various furniture designs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Indonesia's restrictions on community activities ...(PPKM) were carried out. PPKM causes restrictions on outdoor activities so that entrepreneurs experience a decrease in income. Furniture entrepreneurs were also affected and experienced a market decline because the national furniture industry was closed. This research was conducted with the aim of creating a mobile application called Furpare that is expected to help compare the prices of various furniture in e-commerce in Indonesia so that users or consumers do not need to look for furniture in physical stores. The research method is carried out using the stages in Rapid Application Development (RAD), namely requirements planning, user design, construction, and cutover, while the price comparison method is used to compare the prices of one item with another and the Extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) is adopted as a method to evaluate user acceptance of this application. The result of this research is the application can compare the price of furniture, display the details of furniture, and categorize furniture based on the input given by the user or consumer.
This study investigates what influences consumers' extent of online search (i.e., the number of relevant web stores visited) before a purchase. A dataset containing website visitation and transaction ...activities from a panel of US consumers is used to test the hypotheses developed in the study. The results indicate a diminishing effect of competitive density on the extent of search, and the use of advanced information technologies induces more searches. Consumers also search more for experience products than for search products in contrast to the prediction in the nonelectronic market. Furthermore, online purchase experience increases, while product-specific experience reduces, prepurchase search.
Javni gradski prijevoz (JGP) danas je neizostavan dio mobilnosti ljudi u gradovima te kao takvom potrebno mu je posvetiti značajnu pozornost. Cijena JGP-a je posljedica oblika modela subvencije i ...ekonomske snage te volje lokalne samouprave za postizanjem učinkovitog JGP-a. U radu je prikazana analiza osnovnih karakteristika JGP-a u četiri najveća hrvatska grada te u gradovima Beogradu i Ljubljani. Različite opće karakteristike gradova utjecale su na specifičan način razvoja JGP-a za svaki od gradova zasebno, formirajući različite vidove prijevoza, cijene karata i način korištenja usluga. Karakteristike JGP-a prikazuju njegovu efikasnost kroz broj prevezenih putnika i prijeđenih kilometara vozila na mreži kao i sudjelovanje jedinica lokalnih vlasti u potpori takovog prijevoza kroz subvencije. Usporedbom cijena nastoje se prikazati sličnosti i različitosti promatranih gradova kada je u pitanju formiranje cijena kao i utvrditi specifične karakteristike i suradnje pojedinih gradova koje su utjecale na taj proces. Svrha ovog članka je ukazati na karakteristike i probleme koji utječu na formiranje cijena JGP-a, a cilj je detaljnom obradom relevantnih izvora dati konačnu sliku cijena i uzroka njihova formiranja u promatranim gradovima.
Public transportation (PT) is an essential part of urban mobility today and requires significant attention. The cost of PT is influenced by the subsidy model, economic strength, and the willingness of local authorities to achieve efficient public transportation. This paper presents an analysis of the basic characteristics of PT in the four largest Croatian cities, as well as in Belgrade and Ljubljana. Different general characteristics of cities have influenced the unique development of PT for each city, forming various modes of transportation, ticket prices, and service usage. PT characteristics demonstrate its efficiency through the number of passengers transported, vehicle kilometers traveled on the network, and the involvement of local government units in supporting such transportation through subsidies. The comparison of prices aims to illustrate similarities and differences among the observed cities in terms of price formation and identify specific characteristics and collaborations that influenced this process. The purpose of this article is to highlight the characteristics and issues affecting the formation of PT prices, with the goal of providing a comprehensive picture of prices and their causes in the observed cities through detailed analysis of relevant sources.
Does explicit recall help or hurt memory-based comparisons? It is often assumed that attempting to recall information from memory should facilitate—or at least not disrupt—memory-based comparisons. ...Using the domain of price comparisons, the authors demonstrate that memory-based price comparisons are less accurate when consumers first attempt to recall the past price versus when they do not try to do so. Attempting—and failing at—explicit price recall focuses attention on metacognitive experience, resulting in a feeling-of-notknowing, which then blocks the implicit memory that people could otherwise use to make accurate price comparisons. Drawing attention to this metacognitive feeling-of-not-knowing increases the blocking effect of recall on implicit memory, whereas drawing attention away from the feeling reduces the blocking effect. The results identify a new type of memory blocking—metacognitive memory blocking—in which the feeling-of-not-knowing blocks implicit memory during judgments. They also provide further evidence of dual representations of price memory and demonstrate that most memory-based price comparisons are based on implicit memory and do not entail explicit recall of the reference price.
Comparison shopping is good financial practice, but situations involving numbers and computations are challenging for consumers with math anxiety. We asked North Americans (N = 256) to select the ...better deal between two products differing in volume and price. As predicted, math anxiety was negatively related to performance on this Price Comparison Task. We then explored the mechanism underlying this relation by testing math competency, price calculation ability, need for cognition, and cognitive reflection as potential mediators. The results from a competing mediator analysis indicated that all factors, apart from need for cognition, served as significant independent mediators between math anxiety and performance on our Price Comparison Task. This study has important implications for how–and why–math anxiety relates to a person’s ability to accurately compare product prices. These data suggest that consumers higher in math anxiety may represent a financially vulnerable population, particularly in the context of financial tasks that are inherently mathematical.
Abstract
The present empirical study is the first research to examine how the price tolerance of online buyers correlates with price comparison website (PCW) usage and customer relationship status ...(CRS). Longitudinal sales data of power tools and household appliances in 8,097 transactions from a German online shop and scraped PCW price data over a 6-months period in 2021 are used for the analysis. Consumer demand falls on average by around 80% per less favorable PCW rank. In addition, PCW (new) customers show significantly less price tolerance than organic (existing) customers. A small but significant interaction effect induces that the correlation of CRS and price tolerance is stronger for organic than for PCW customers.
A substantial literature indicates that competition on price comparison websites is fierce, leading to lower prices for products sold. As such, we want to answer the key research question: Why do ...firms compete on price comparison websites? Based on theory, we suggest that participation in these marketplaces leads to increased productivity, i.e., output increases when holding constant the level of inputs used. This, in turn, leads to increased profits, motivating firms to enter price comparison websites despite fierce competition. To find out if theory holds, we empirically investigate how firm entry into a price comparison website affects firm productivity, profits, and wages. Empirically investigating the impact of PriceSpy market participation on productivity, profits, and wages is not easy since firms are free to select whether and when to enter or exit the PriceSpy marketplace, and we use a two-step procedure to address this problem. In the first step, we control for differences in observables between entering firms and potential control-group firms. Then, in a second step, we use a within-firm difference-in-difference estimator on the matched data to investigate how entry into the PriceSpy marketplace affects output while holding inputs constant. Our results indicate that for the full sample of firms, PriceSpy participation increases output by almost 12% when holding the level of inputs constant. Also, an investigation of who gains from the increased productivity shows that, for entering firms, operating profits increase by 9% and gross wages by 14% when studying the full sample of firms. That labor gains more from PriceSpy participation is even clearer when studying the impact on wholesale and retail firms separately. For those firms, wages increased by 16-17% after entry, while no statistically significant impact was found regarding operating profits.
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