Consumers with limited discretionary money face important trade-offs when decid10 ing how to spend it. In the current research, we suggest that feelings of financial constraint increase consumers’ concern about the lasting utility of their purchases, which in turn increases their preference for material goods over experiences. The results of seven studies confirm that the consideration of finan...

Can location-based mobile promotion (LMP) trigger contemporaneous and delayed sales purchases? As mobile technologies can reach users anywhere and anytime, LMP becomes a promising new channel. We unravel the dynamic sales impact of LMP, on the basis of a randomized field experiment with 22,000 mobile users sponsored by one of the largest mobile service providers in the world. Our identification...

OBJECTIVE In 2009, the US Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) began to provide participants with cash-value vouchers to purchase fruits and vegetables ($US 10 for women and $US 6 for children per month). The present paper assesses the potential effects of the new WIC incentives on fruit and vegetable purchases among WIC households in two New England sta...

Jeanette Davis is a senior economist in the Branch of Research and Program Development, Division of Consumer Expenditure Surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics. LINDA STINSON NHIEN TO JEANETTE DAVIS Interest in American expenditures has a long history dating back to the late 1800s, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) first looked at the economic welfare of our early immigrants. Today, BLS is...

It is well known that risk is a significant factor affecting ecommerce purchases among consumers. Consumers perceive a variety of often novel risks in such transactions. This empirical study evaluates the effect of prior experience (e.g., effects of the number of online purchases, average amount of online purchases, types of purchased products, daily average number of hours spent on the Interne...

We examine grocery shopping paths through the lens of the “Traveling Salesman Problem” (TSP), a classic paradigm from the field of operations research. We define the “TSP-optimal” path for each shopper as the shortest path that connects all of his purchases, and we study the systematic deviations seen in his actual behavior. We decompose the length of each observed path into three components: t...

OBJECTIVE Development of a method using marketing research data to assess food purchase behavior and consequent nutrient availability for purposes of nutrition surveillance, evaluation of intervention effects, and epidemiologic studies of diet-health relationships. DESIGN Data collected on household food purchases accrued over a 13-week period were selected by using Universal Product Code num...

An in-store experiment was performed to investigate the effects of shelf placement (high, middle, low) on consumers' purchases of potato chips. Placement of potato chips on the middle shelf was associated with the highest percentage of purchases. The results confirm the importance of item placement as a factor in consumers' buying behavior.

OBJECTIVE To describe ready-to-eat (RTE) cereal purchases in 2008 in the USA according to cereal nutritional quality and marketing strategy and household sociodemographic characteristics. DESIGN Cross-sectional study of purchases in one year. Each type of cereal was assigned to one of four nutrition quality categories (based on Nutrient Profile Index, NPI) and one of four advertising categori...

BACKGROUND Sugar-sweetened beverages are a target for reduction in the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Concerns have been raised about sugar-sweetened beverages purchased with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. PURPOSE This paper describes purchases of non-alcoholic refreshment beverages among participants in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Special Suppleme...