Trust is acknowledged as a central tenet of business relationships. Yet for all the attention it receives, rarely has trust been investigated in the Chinese business setting. This paper uses an emic approach to unearth some within-culture ‘truths’ about Chinese notions of trust in business...

Recent experimental research has shown that when rating systems are available, buyers are more generous in accepting unfair offers made by sellers. It has also shown that sellers make fairer decisions when they are rated, while some studies show that they are little affected by the rating...

This article investigates the role emotions play in economic decisions. In a computer based experiment our participants were the consumers of a fictitious service bearing resemblance to that offered by mobile phone operators. In each of 17 rounds a participant had to choose between retaining the...

Individuals vary in their willingness to take financial risks. Here we show that variants of two genes that regulate dopamine and serotonin neurotransmission and have been previously linked to emotional behavior, anxiety and addiction (5-HTTLPR and DRD4) are significant determinants of risk...

After a deep review of the main economic studies and applications about the emerging problem of obesity, this paper focuses on a particular aspect of the issue: the improvement of fruit and vegetable purchasing in retailing sector. First of all it has been analyzed the actual presence of...

As a Norwegian sociologist pointed out recently at the Encontro Internacional de Vilamoura on Fishing, “the fisheries management is the management of people, not fish" This statement may surprise many specialists, but it puts once again a series of questions and problems in their true place:...

The European Commission has formally recognised that adequate provision of basic household services, including energy, communications, water and transport, is key to ensuring equity, social cohesion and solidarity. Yet little research has been done on the impact of the reform of these services...

The paper presents partial results from an Italian study on consumer perception and knowledge of organic food and related behaviour. Uses the means-end chain model to link attributes of products to the needs of consumers. In order to provide insights into consumer motivation in purchasing...

We have assembled a unique loan-level performance dataset for mortgages originated in the UK to study the differences in default likelihood between loans of varying borrower and loan characteristics. We can broadly confirm the relevance of most commonly known riskfactors and find that most...