Travel cost and contingent valuation methods are applied to the problem of estimating the potential consumer surpltrs avai!abfe to international nature tourists from a rain forest conservation project in Madagascar. Data are derived from srrrveys of nature tourists in Madagascar and international, nature tolrrism professionals in the U.S. and Europe. Typical trip travel cost models are used to ...

Defective consumer products impose significant costs on consumers and third parties when they cause fatalities and injuries. This Article develops a novel approach to measuring the true extent of such costs, which may not be accurately captured under current methods of estimating the cost of dangerous products. Current analysis rests on a narrowly defined set of costs, excluding certain types o...

We present a dynamic duopoly model in which consumers have meanvariance preferences. Due to the form of the utility function, two effects arise endogenously in the presence of information asymmetries: (a) switching cost e¤ect, that increases the consumer’s willingness to pay for the brand that she tested before, and (b) perception e¤ect, that increases the consumer’s willingness to pay if the s...

As a new type of word-of-mouth information, online consumer product review is an emerging market phenomenon that is playing an increasingly important role in consumers’ purchase decisions. This paper argues that online consumer review, a type of product information created by users based on personal usage experience, can serve as a new element in the marketing communications mix and work as fre...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of monopoly differential pricing in the important but largely neglected case where marginal costs of service differ across consumer groups. Compared to uniform pricing, cost-based differential pricing generally raises total welfare. Although total output may fall or even its allocation across consumer groups may worsen, under a minor demand curvature cond...

We study the welfare effects of an increase in firms’ information about consumer naivete in a simple reduced-form model in which competitive firms can introduce distortionary fees that naive consumers ignore when making purchase decisions. We establish that our model captures many markets—including those for credit, banking, hotels, gambling, and mobile phones—in which consumer naivete has been...

Pricing over multiple periods under forward-looking, strategic consumer purchasing behavior has received significant recent research attention; however, whether consumers actually benefit from this behavior and would voluntarily choose to be strategic has not been previously considered. We explore this question, and show that many consumers have lower surplus if they are strategic than if they ...

Consumer perception could play an important role in the adoption of renewable energy technologies. This study aims to explore the role of consumer acceptance and model its effect on residential photovoltaic (PV) adoption. A survey was conducted to understand consumer perceptions of the technology (perception variables), such as perceived cost, perceived maintenance requirement, and environmenta...

Awareness of the importance to install anti-spyware software in one's computer has increased in this digital world. This research aims to investigate the relationship between relative advantage, moral compatibility, ease of use, subjective norms, image, computing capacity, perceived cost, and trialability, and the consumer intention to use the antispyware software. Data was coded and analyzed i...