Building relationships with patients to create patient-centered care is critical to the success of health care organizations. A core element in relationships is commitment. Commitment may be based on affect and emotions, perceived costs, and even obligation. This research proposes that three types of commitment-affective, continuance, and normative commitment-differentially impact consumer purc...

Brand image is defined and measured as a “set of associations which a brand has acquired for an individual” (Joyce, 1963, p. 45) and as “brand associations in consumer memory” (Keller, 1993). Strategic marketing decisions, such as positioning and segmentation, are typically based on market information obtained through consumer surveys. Brand-based industries use key market information from bran...

Boundedly rational consumers rely on their social environment as a source of information. Drawing upon psychological theories about social comparison processes, we hypothesize that social reference groups underlie market segments. New reference groups can emerge from social comparison processes, leading to the establishment of new submarkets and the evolution of aggregate consumer heterogeneity...

This paper tests the ability of two consumer theories the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behavior in predicting consumer online grocery buying intention. In addition, a comparison of the two theories is conducted. Data were collected from two webbased surveys of Danish (n=1222) and Swedish (n=1038) consumers using self-administered questionnaires. Lisrel results suggest tha...

Several surveys attest to growing public concerns regarding privacy, aggravated by the diffusion of information technologies. A policy of self-regulation that allows individual companies to implement self-designed privacy statements is prevalent in the United States.These statements rarely provide specific privacy guarantees that personal information will be kept confidential. This study provid...

Economists since the days of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham have traditionally viewed consumers as driven by relentless and consistent pursuit of selfinterest, with their choices in the marketplace providing all the measurements needed to reveal their preferences and assess their well-being. This theory of the consumer is empirically successful, and provides the foundation for most economic poli...

Foodborne illnesses may be related to many food production factors with home practices of consumers playing an important role in food safety. Consumer behavior for handling food leftovers has been studied, however little work on comparisons among countries has been published. The objective of this study was to investigate home food leftover practices of people from North American, South America...

Software agents help automate a variety of tasks including those involved in buying and selling products over the Internet. This paper surveys several of these agent-mediated electronic commerce systems by describing their roles in the context of a Consumer Buying Behavior (CBB) model. The CBB model we present augments traditional marketing models with concepts from Software Agents research to ...