Although electronic word-of-mouth via social networking sites (or sWOM) greatly induced online shopping, its importance in shopping decisions during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has not been holistically considered. Based on the necessity of sWOM, uses and gratifications theory...

We propose a functional principal components method that accounts for stratified random sample weighting and time dependence in the observations to understand the evolution of distributions of monthly micro-level consumer prices for the United Kingdom (UK). We apply the method to publicly...