This paper argues that telecommunications markets present the consumer with a decision-making environment that is particularly likely to be prone to established biases in consumer decision-making. The analysis identifies four properties of telecommunications markets, which in combination are...

Two laboratory studies investigated the effect of price transparency on consumers' decision-making in the residential electricity market. The first tested whether consumers have difficulties when confronted with unit prices expressed as discounts from standard rates, which vary between...

Identifying whether hyperbolic advertising claims influence consumers is important for consumer protection, but differentiating mere "puffery" from misleading advertising is not straightforward. We conducted a pre-registered experiment to determine whether pseudo-technical advertising claims...

The introduction of smart technology and dynamic tariffs (such as time-of-use tariffs) provides multiple potential benefits for electricity markets. However, time-of-use tariffs represent an additional complexity for consumer tariff choices in electricity markets. How well consumers may choose...

Encouraging consumers to seek out and switch to lower-rate mortgages is important both for the individual consumer's finances and for functioning competitive markets, but switching rates are low. We conducted an experiment with mortgage-holders to test whether official advice on how to select...

Growth in energy demand together with the expansion of variable renewables has significant implications for the future electricity system. The increased volatility from growing intermittent production requires new sources of flexibility at a much greater scale to help maintain system balance. In...

Household appliances represent significant load demand within the domestic electricity market, and therefore present considerable challenges for grid managers, specifically during peak demand periods. This paper presents the results of a statistically representative study of Irish households,...

The paper uses a multinomial logit model to study the determinants of domestic space heating systems in Ireland. Nine types of heating systems are considered, classified by fuel type (liquid, electric, gas and solids or combinations thereof). Heating system choice is modelled as a function of...

A Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) plan is an innovative, complex and increasingly popular form of car finance. Consumers pay a deposit and monthly payments, but instead of paying off the total value of the car, they pay off the depreciation over a specified term. We used an experiment to...

We critically examine and empirically test the hypothesis that the strong socioeconomic gradients characterising attendance at arts events result from similar gradients in preferences for the arts, in line with existing theories of demand for the arts derived from orthodox consumer theory. To...