Embedding is the widely-observed phenomenon that a good is assigned a higher value if evaluated on its own rather than as part of a more inclusive set. Embedding is considered a serious problem affecting the quality of many environmental management and health risk policy judgments. This paper presents the results of an experiment involving of a structured, small-group approach for conducting en...

We study whether and how a firm can enhance social contagion by simply varying the message shared by customers with their friends. We focus on two key components of information contained in the messages – information about sender’s purchase status prior to referral, and information about the existence of referral rewards – and their impacts on the recipient’s purchase decision and further refer...

*Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York; †Purchase College, Counseling Center, State University of New York—Purchase, Purchase, New York; and ‡Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, New York, New York. Reprints: Dr. Ross Levin, Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine Campus, 106 Rousso Bld.,...

This essay analyzes the market demand by eligible participants for in-kind transfer payments of the type that reduce the free market price participants would otherwise have to pay for the product being subsidized. Examples are the Food Stamp Program, public housing programs, and such proposed programs as rent subsidy and health co-insurance programs. Two common forms for such programs are analy...

There are strong theoretical arguments for the creation of advance-purchase agreements to increase incentives for the development and production of vaccines for diseases concentrated in low-income countries. A Center for Global Development working group recently concluded that such agreements could be implemented successfully. We consider the practical economic and legal arrangements for such a...

T measurement of customer lifetime value is important because it is used as a metric in evaluating decisions in the context of customer relationship management. For a firm, it is important to form some expectations as to the lifetime value of each customer at the time a customer starts doing business with the firm, and at each purchase by the customer. In this paper, we use a hierarchical Bayes...

a r t i c l e i n f o Absent or weak income effects reported in many contingent valuation studies have cast doubt on the reliability of the survey method. We find that the income effect depends on the type of public good in question: there is a negative income effect for willingness to pay for recycling, which requires time and effort for sorting, but a positive effect for the more convenient i...

Extended service contracts have been the major profit generator for many consumer electronics retailers as they contribute to half of the retailers' profit. My dissertation studies how consumers make purchase decisions of extended service contracts and how the ESC purchase decisions are related to the product purchase decisions. Essay 1: " Why Do Consumers Buy Extended Service Contracts? " The ...