Corporate social responsibility (CSR) surveys repeatedly indicate significant consumer interest in products and services of businesses that follow virtuous business practices. Yet the existence of a causal relationship between company responsibility and its financial performance is a contested area, and clear evidence that CSR would create a competitive advantage is missing. As ethical evaluati...

An Additive Double-Logarithmic Consumer Demand System Lester D. Taylor University of Arizona Despite obvious theoretical shortcomings, the double-logarithmic function, because of ease of estimation and generally superior fit, is often the demand function of choice in applied demand analysis. However, the drawback to double-logarithmic demand functions is that they are not theoretically plausibl...

Household-level data on consumer expenditures underpins a wide range of empirical research in modern economics, spanning microand macroeconomics. This research includes work on consumption and saving, on poverty and inequality, and on risk sharing and insurance. We review different ways in which such data can be collected or captured: traditional detailed budget surveys, less onerous survey pro...

Over the last several decades, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) have emerged as a zero tailpipe-emission alternative to the battery electric vehicle (EV). To address questions about consumer reaction to FCVs, this report presents the results of a “ride-and-drive” clinic series (n=182) held in 2007 with a Mercedes-Benz A-Class “F-Cell” hydrogen FCV. The clinic evaluated participant reactions t...

environmental protection is not at odds with the proper use of all the offered possibilities.along these lines, the touristic products available to the consumer has increased exponentially over the lastfew years which has made it possible to convert territorial and patrimonial resources into significant elementsof recreational use put into value at service of the consumer. surveys on the recrea...

We report results from two surveys of representative samples of Americans with private health insurance. The first examines how well Americans understand, and believe they understand, traditional health insurance coverage. The second examines whether those insured under a simplified all-copay insurance plan will be more likely to engage in cost-reducing behaviors relative to those insured under...

Brand-extension strategies enhance success chances of new products, even though they expose brand image to dilution risks. The present work analyzes how brand-extension evaluation can affect the current brand image and proposes a theoretical model formed by five main factors related to brand associations, extension congruency and extension attitude. The model estimation includes structural equa...

The quality of user experience is intricately related to the users’ cultural characteristics. However, not many studies have dealt with important cultural characteristics which are closely related to user experience. The main goals of this study are to identify important cultural dimensions that are closely related to the user experience of consumer electronic products and to measure them in di...

innovation has attracted considerable interest in recent years in improving competitive advantage for both profit and nonprofit organizations. service innovation offers the potential for substantially improving the performance, but performance gains are often obstructed by users’ unwillingness to accept and use available systems. this research aims to use the concept of reasoned action theory t...