No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Recent research has unveiled a robust and pervasive phenomenon: individual members of a group consistently perceive higher levels of discrimination directed at their group as a whole as compared to themselves personally as members of that group. This phenomenon has been labelled the "personal/group discrimination discrepancy". Two studies were conducted using female subjects to investigate possible explanations underlying the personal/group discrimination discrepancy. Study 1 examined the effect of question wording employed in previous research. Study 2 investigated the relationship between an individual's perceptions of personal and group discrimination and her personal and social identity with respect to women as a group. Contrary to the main hypothesis, those subjects who made stronger associations between themselves personally as women and women as a group demonstrated a larger discrepancy between ratings of personal and group discrimination as compared to those subjects who less strongly associated themselves personally with the group. This result is discussed in terms of Turner's (1982) concept of depersonalization.

The thesis describes a program of research aimed at delineating an important concept in the social psychology of intergroup relations: tokenism. A series of experiments first established that disadvantaged group members faced with open access to an advantaged group (meritocracy) choose either inaction or attempts at individual upward mobility. Conversely, those faced with an advantaged group that is closed (complete discrimination) engage primarily in collective nonnormative action. However, when faced with severe, but not total, discriminatory restrictions (tokenism), disadvantaged group members consistently prefer individual nonnormative action. This preference is unaffected by increases in ingroup identification, increased prior ingroup interaction, and removal of direct self-interest. Some support was found for the role of situational ambiguity in maintaining the preference for individual action in conditions of tokenism. In two final experiments the behavioral responses of "successful tokens" were investigated. These experiments show that successful tokens shift their allegiance from the disadvantaged group to the advantaged group and choose action in support of this new high-status ingroup at the expense of the disadvantaged group.

Occupationism recently has been introduced and defined as discrimination on the basis of one's occupation (Carson, 1992; Krumboltz, 1991, 1992). In this qualitative study, the existence of occupationism is investigated through the examination of the results of interviews with six funeral directors. The statements of the participants describing occupationist acts (either positive or negative) were classified into a number of categories at both fine-grained and more superordinate levels. Implications of the results for the proposed occupationism construct and suggestions for future research and career interventions are discussed.

In this paper, I empirically identify a new source of price discrimination utilized by airlines, namely, price discrimination based on the day of the week a ticket is purchased. Using unique transaction data, I compare tickets that are identical in every aspect except day of the week purchased (that is, traveling on the same date on the same route on the same airline with the same restrictions on flights with the same load factors and purchased the same number of days in advance), and find that airfares are cheapest when bought on the weekend. The size of this weekend purchase effect varies with distribution channel (online or offline) and how far in advance of departure the ticket is purchased. For transactions occurring more than two weeks before the departure date, offline weekend purchases are 3% cheaper than those made on weekdays, but online purchase prices do not differ significantly throughout the week. Conversely, in the final two weeks before departure, weekend purchases are 4% less expensive online but not significantly cheaper offline. These findings are consistent with price discrimination between high-elasticity leisure customers and low-elasticity business customers. If airlines believe that weekend purchasers are more likely to be price-elastic leisure travelers, then they may offer lower prices or make deals more transparent on the weekend. This conjecture is supported by the finding that the weekend purchase effect is generally larger on routes with a mixture of both business and leisure customers than on routes primarily traveled by leisure customers because price discrimination is both possible and effective on these heterogeneous routes.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

Advances in information technologies have increasingly enabled firms to use consumers' past purchasing data to charge different prices to its own customers and to those customers that in some sense belong to the rival firm. At first glance this new form of price discrimination seems to be lucrative as it allows a firm to generate profitable incremental sales without damaging profits it can extract from its own customer base. However, as behaviour-based price discrimination gains popularity many interesting questions arise. Is it, really, in the best interest of firms to recognise customers with different past behaviour and to price discriminate accordingly? Or is it rather in their interest to avoid any possible learning and thereby price discrimination practices? Should consumers hide their true types, i.e., should they behave anonymously? Further, should government regulation restrict information collection and price discrimination practices? The study of these questions is the study of the profit and welfare effects of behaviourbased price discrimination. This is the central issue of this thesis. With that in mind, this thesis addresses three theoretical models. The first one is based on the hypothesis that the ability of firms to predict the preferences of individual customers for the purpose of price discrimination is less than perfect but is constantly improving due to advances in information technologies. Here the main goal will be to investigate how profits, consumer surplus and welfare evolve as price discrimination is based on more accurate information. The second model is a natural sequel of the former as it tries to model how firms might obtain a signal of a consumer's preferences. Whether or not a given consumer bought from the firm previously might be used as an accurate signal of a consumer's preferences. A key issue here will be to examine whether or not it is in the interest of firms to avoid learning and price discrimination and how can they attain that goal. Finally, the third model studies the interaction between purely informative advertising and price discrimination based on customers' past behaviour. As without advertising consumers are left out of the market, the welfare effects of price discrimination are guided by how will price discrimination affect each firm's advertising decisions in relation to the social optimal level of advertising.