Many supporters of the tax cut enacted this summer viewed it as an important stimulus to consumer spending. But an analysis of the effects of earlier income tax cuts suggests that the consumer response to such initiatives is, in fact, quite variable. Two conclusions stand out: First, consumers will be more likely to boost spending if the change in tax liabilities is permanent. Second, consumers...

A growing literature has documented evidence that consumers in health insurance markets are inertial, or behave as though they face substantial switching costs in choosing a health insurance plan. I investigate whether the private firms that provide prescription drug insurance through Medicare Part D exploit this inertia when setting prices. I first document descriptive evidence consistent with...

Dynamic pricing is a standard practice that sellers use for revenue management. With the vast availability of pricing and inventory data on the Internet, it is possible for consumers to become aware of the pricing strategies used by sellers and to develop strategic responses. In this paper, we study the strategic response of consumers to dynamic prices for perishable products. As price fluctuat...

The papers in the session "Food Culture and Consumer Response," show how important people's values, beliefs, aspirations and social context are to their dietary health. They also reveal several tensions that shape consumer responses to healthy food. This essay discusses the paradoxical nature of eating habits in general, and describes three paradoxes related specifically to the challenges of pr...

In Japan, a large U.S. export market, there has been growing public opposition against genetically modified (GM) foods. Using a dichotomous choice contingent valuation method, findings show the discount needed for Japanese Seikyou consumers to purchase GM food products is positively affected (i.e., a greater discount is required) by higher levels of self-reported risk perceptions toward GM food...

In coming years residential consumers will face real-time electricity tariffs with energy prices varying day to day, and effective energy saving will require automation – a recommender system, which learns consumer’s preferences from her actions. A consumer chooses a scenario of home appliance use to balance her comfort level and the energy bill. We propose a Bayesian learning algorithm to esti...

Traditional brand tracking data have been used by marketing managers for decades to understand consumer response to brands. Marketers and advertisers are highly enthusiastic about the opportunities that the new online tool Google Insights for Search (IFS) provides to monitor “rising searches” and analyze consumer search trends. IFS augments traditional brand tracking data in unprecedented ways,...

Vol. XLVIII (February 2011), 185 –195 *David Gal is Assistant Professor of Marketing (e-mail: d-gal@kellogg. northwestern.edu), and Derek D. Rucker is Associate Professor of Marketing (e-mail: [email protected]), Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Support to the second author from the Richard M. Clewett Professorship, Kellogg School of Management, Northwester...

For the energy management problems for demand response in electricity grid, a Metropolis Criterion based fuzzy Q-learning consumer energy management controller (CEMC) is proposed. Because of the uncertainties and highly time-varying, it is not easy to accurately obtain the complete information for the consumer behavior in electricity grid. In this case, the Q-learning, which is independent of m...