Rapid transformation in marketing information technologies has enabled corporations to build ample consumer databases and analyze those using sophisticated data-mining techniques to obtain extensive knowledge about those consumers’ personal life styles and private matters. Considering that the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has relied on fair information principles to guide privac...

This paper explains a technique and presents empirical results for measuring the change in elderly consumer’s welfare due to price changes in items in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). A new approach for measuring welfare changes due to price changes in owner-occupied housing in a static and dynamic setting is the cornerstone of this research. The model treats housing as an asset with the fundame...

Counterfeiting causes hundreds of billions dollars of losses around the world every year. Due to the growing prominence of online commerce, the seriousness of the situation could soon become much worse. Hence, reaching a clear understanding of the fundamental economic incentives behind this practice is of vital importance. In this paper, we investigate a problem within which a firm selling a co...

T his article describes an important improvement in the calculation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The Bureau of Labor Statistics plans to use a new geometric mean formula for calculating most of the basic components of the Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U) and the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). This change will become effective ...

When a firm can recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their past purchases in order to price discriminate. We study a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers have the ability to maintain their anonymity and avoid being identified as past customers, possibly at a cost. When consumers can freely maintain their anonymity, they al...

Consumer Generated Media(CGM) is growing rapidly and the amount of content is increasing. However, it is often difficult for users to extract important contents and the existence of contents recording their experiences can easily be forgotten. As there are no methods or systems to indicate the subjective value of the contents or ways to reuse them, subjective annotation appending subjectivity, ...

Beneficiaries of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program received an 11.2-percent cost-of-living increase in benefits effective June 1981. This increase, the seventh automatic increase since 1975, was reflected in btiefit checks issued early in July. Automatic benefit increases are tied by statute to rises in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). They are initiated whenever t...

The consumer price index (CPI) is an important indicator of inflation in a market economy. It is necessary to regularly monitor and improve the quality of the CPI. Before one can develop a quality assurance system, one has to formulate a conceptual framework for evaluating the quality of consumer price statistics. In this paper various quality aspects of the CPI are presented. These aspects are...

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 532 I. OVERVIEW OF SMART GRID DEVELOPMENT ....................... 533 II. WHY NUSP-CONSUMER INTERACTIONS SHOULD BE REGULATED .............................................................................. 534 A. What are NUSPs and How Do They Interact with Consumers? ....................................