It is well-known that the general health information seeking lay-person, regardless of his/her education, cultural background, and economic status, is not as familiar with-or comfortable using-the technical terms commonly used by healthcare professionals. One of the primary reasons for this is due to the differences in perspectives and understanding of the vocabulary used by patients and provid...

Traditionally, policymakers and financial markets have regarded the “core” consumer price index (CPI) as a key inflation indicator. The core CPI, a special index published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), excludes the volatile prices of food and energy. In excluding these components, BLS recognizes that prices that swing dramatically in response to unusual shifts in weather and other un...

Modified BG Prasad socioeconomic scale is widely used to determine the socioeconomic status of study subjects in health studies in India. It is an income-based scale and, therefore, has to be constantly updated to take inflation and depreciation of rupee into account. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for industrial workers (IW) is used to calculate updated income categories for January 2014. Deta...

This paper suggests that the interaction between consumers has an impact on market structure, in addition to each consumer’s own behavior. In this paper, we replicate the artificial market model proposed by Onozaki and Yanagita, and extend it by adding the network of consumers in order to show that the interaction between consumers in the market affects emerging and changing the market structur...

Many pre-professional dance studios have become consumer driven in response to the growing economic practice of neoliberalism. Neoliberal values have become more prominent in today’s economy and inevitably seeped into the lives of dancers and instructors, creating consumer based pre-professional training schools. This paper argues that the current neoliberal state of the United States is negati...

Consumer knowledge is understood to play a role in managing risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease and may be influenced by level of education. The association between population knowledge, behaviours and actual salt consumption was explored overall, and for more-educated compared to less-educated individuals. A cross-sectional survey was done in an age-and sex-stratified random sa...

Eco-certification has become an increasingly popular market-based tool in the endeavor to reduce negative environmental impacts from fisheries and aquaculture. In this study, we aimed at investigating which psychological consumer characteristics influence demand for eco-labeled seafood by correlating consumers’ stated purchasing of eco-labeled seafood to nine variables: environmental knowledge ...

When comparing health plans on scores from the Medicare Managed Care Consumer Assessment of Health Plans (MMC-CAHPS®) survey, the results should be adjusted for patient characteristics, not under the control of health plans, that might affect survey results. We developed an adjustment model that uses self-reported measures of health status, age, education, and whether someone helped the respond...

In this presentation we will borrow from a business concept called ’massindividualization’ which accounts for a change in consumer market conditions towards extreme heterogeneity and unpredictability. In a short exercise we will apply and convert the main ideas behind this new business concept to the world of education and learning. First we develop a 5-scale typology for consumer markets in ge...

It is well-known that switching costs may facilitate monopoly pricing in a market with price competition between two suppliers of a homogenous good, provided the switching cost is above some critical level. We show that introducing consumer heterogeneity tends to increase the critical switching cost and thereby reduce the stability of the collusive outcome. A testable implication is that widesp...