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...

How people perceive and forecast inflation has the potential to impact on a range of economic outcomes. We reveal large, systematic overestimation of inflation by Irish consumers, which varies by social group. In contrast to previous work in this area, our models suggest the upward bias and the...

Following the Euro changeover in January 2002, consumers across the Euro Area perceived a sharp rise in inflation, in contrast to official figures. Several theories have been advanced to explain this apparent economic illusion, but they struggle to account for its striking scale and persistence....

The public/private mix in Irish health care is nowhere more evident than in the acute hospital system where both public and private patients can be treated in public hospitals by the same consultant. By undertaking new analyses of data from the Hospital In-Patient Enquiry Scheme, this study...

This study uses country-level panel data on consumption in Ireland and seven other OECD countries to examine the evolution of Irish consumption patterns as Ireland underwent rapid macroeconomic growth. Consumption levels obviously increased due to substantially higher incomes, but it is less...

Domestic water demand is influenced both by the number of households and their characteristics, in particular the extent to which they employ water-using appliances. This paper focuses on domestic ownership of water-using appliances in Ireland, a country where rapid economic and demographic...

This paper analyses the household formation and tenure choice decisions of different age cohorts in the Irish market. We use data covering the years 2001 to 2011, a period which encompasses the boom, bubble and collapse in the Irish housing market. We find that the household formation decision...

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...