Laypersons ("consumers") often have difficulty finding, understanding, and acting on health information due to gaps in their domain knowledge. Ideally, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) would reflect the different ways consumers express and think about health topics, helping to bridge this vocabulary gap. However, despite the recent research on mismatches between consumer and professional lan...

A common challenge in the Consumer Data Industry is how to integrate data with inconsistencies from multiple sources into a single consolidated view. For example, a credit bureau needs to integrate consumer credit history reported by multiple credit lending institutions. Over the past few years, a novel approach, information arbitration, has emerged to produce full attribution, reversible, and ...

This research aims to develop a framework of consumer–brand relationship by taking an experiential view. In this article, the authors report a cross-cultural comparative study that was conducted on a sample of real consumers at coffee chain stores in Shanghai, China, and Taipei, Taiwan. The findings reveal that individual as well as shared experiences work through brand association, brand perso...

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing refers to testing sold directly to consumers via the Internet, television, or other marketing venues without involving health care professionals. As the recent Supreme Court ruling eliminated the patentability of human genes, this rapidly evolving segment in the laboratory testing industry is starting to attract increasing scrutiny by government, scienti...

Standards of treatment and care should be acceptable to healthcare consumers as well as to healthcare professionals. A simple categorisation of standards according to their acceptability to consumers is outlined. Professional/consumer groups which review and set standards are discussed, with emphasis on the principles of partnership. Working together towards consensus can be diYcult but is now ...

In this study we draw on varied theoretical perspectives to explore and gain an alternative understanding of consumption at New Consumption Communities (NCCs). Intrinsic to the notion of NCCs is a sense of community between production-engaged consumers who question market practices deemed inadequate or unfair. Reported findings are part of a three-year ethnographic research project and suggest ...

The causes and ramifications of the rise in the consumer debt burden over time have been subject to much debate. This paper first offers a brief overview and analysis of the key economic variables used to evaluate consumer debt levels. The principal focus of the paper, however, is a broad review of the literature on the topic of consumer debt to provide a framework for how to assess recent cred...