The growth of the Internet has led to a dramatic increase in the number of consumer or "user" product ratings, which are posted online by individuals who have consumed a good, and are available to other individuals as they make decisions about which products to purchase. These ratings have the...

Today’s world faces many challenges that may be solved by using the principles of bioeconomy. Bioeconomy has had a multi-disciplinary approach with the objective of an integrated scope, namely, to achieve sustainable development. In a knowledge-based economy, the link between sustainable...

This chapter examines how the original tenets of the affect-as-information hypothesis can be extended to explain a wide range of judgment phenomena, especially with respect to consumer decision making. To this end, research within social psychology as well as research from other fields such as...

We consider a firm’s choice of service rate in the following environment. The firm may have high or low quality, and sells a good to consumers who are heterogeneously informed. Consumers arrive according to a Poisson process and are serviced in a random period of time. If a consumer arrives...

The objective of this note is to revisit the meaningfulness of the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) and apply it to the recent debate on liberal paternalism and consumer protection. The CJT con-sists of two parts, (a) stating that a jury of experts is always more competent than a single expert given...

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, utilitarian aggregation necessitates a present bias. In lab experiments three quarters of `social planners' exhibited present biases, and...

Online labor markets provide new opportunities for behavioral research, but conducting economic experiments online raises important methodological challenges. This particularly holds for interactive designs. In this paper, we provide a methodological discussion of the similarities and...

This paper focuses on the process of coalition formation conditioning the common decision to adopt a shared good, which cannot be afforded by an average single consumer and whose use cannot be exhausted by any single consumer. An agent based model is developed to study the interplay between...

Emerging markets (EMs) collectively represent more than half of the world population with rapidly increasing purchasing power. In spite of recent advances, consumer research of EMs is limited in scope and concept development and thus inadequately reflects EM realities in comparison with theories...

This paper addresses concerns that the U.S. payment system is not keeping up with the rest of the digital economy in providing new methods of payment that give consumers immediate access to and use of their deposits held in accounts with banks and other deposit-taking institutions ("banks" for...