In the age of Web 2.0 users contribute to platforms success by providing personal information by actively uploading information (e.g. messages, preferences, biographies) and also by leaving traces of their online behavoiour as can be derived from their clicks, navigation paths, etc. While there is a market for trading such information among companies, there is little knowledge about how users actually value their personal information. In an online survey-based experiment we have asked 1.045 Facebook users how much they would be willing to pay for keeping their personal information. Surprisingly, 48.1 percent of participants are not willing to pay a single Euro, - thus, valuing their information at zero. Results indicate that people that show 'spamming' behaviour and users that use Facebook for 'diary keeping' are significantly more willing to pay a certain amount higher than zero to be able to keep their personal Facebook information. Interestingly, having analysed various kinds of user behaviour, the regression model still explains no more than 14.2 percent of variance. Additionally, this article discusses four different method manipulations for eliciting people's willingness to pay for personal information and provides methodical guidance for future research in the field.

In this paper we address the problem of negative estimates of willingness to pay. We find that there exist a number of goods and services, especially in the fields of marketing and environmental valuation, for which only zero or positive WTP is meaningful. For the valuation of these goods an econometric model for the analysis of repeated dichotomous choice data is proposed. Our model restricts the domain of the estimates of WTP to strictly positive values, while also allowing for the detection of zero WTP. The model is tested on a simulated and a real data set.

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M.A. (Tourism and Hospitality Management) / The primary objective of this study was to determine the relationship between perceived value and the purchase intentions of consumers relating to Private Label Brands (PLBs) of wine within the retail sector in South Africa. Private Label Brands (PLBs), also referred to as store brands or house brands, are defined as products that the retailer owns, sells and distributes to consumers. Producer brands, which are also known as manufacturer or national brands, are made by a specific brand name company or producer. If retailers can successfully influence the perceived value of their PLB wines, it will allow them to influence consumers’ purchase intentions and increase their profits and market share. This study adds value to the limited research that is available on the perceived value of PLB wines in South Africa, and the effect that it has on consumers’ purchase intentions. The study provides valuable insight for Mass Grocery Retailers (MGRs) on how to effectively market their PLB wines in order to capture a larger market share, and gain a competitive edge over their brand name rivals. This study aimed to investigate the moderating role of perceived value on consumers’ purchase intentions of private label wine brands. Perceived relative price, perceived quality and perceived risk comprise the concept of perceived value, which affects consumers’ purchase intentions. These aspects in the wine purchasing decision have not been researched extensively in South Africa and in order for MGRs to take advantage of the unique growth opportunity that the PLB market has to offer, in-depth research needed to be conducted...

A laboratory scale method was used to produce pellets from cassia tora stems with pelletizing temperature conditions of 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, 105 and 120oC under a pressure of 50, 70, 90,120 and 140 MPa. A total of 30 pellets were produced under each condition of production. The physical and chemical properties of the pellets were investigated. The pellets produced under 75oC and 90 MPa were found to have durability 90 %. A Bulk density range of 617 to 619 kgm-3 was measured for all the produced pellets irrespective of production conditions. The pellets produced in the range of 50 MPa/30oC-140 MPa/120oC were found to have a moisture content ranging between 7.18- 9.6 %. Ash content of 4.2 % was achieved using both Thermogravimetry (TGA) and CEN/TC 335 standard. The gross calorific value of the pellet was determined to be in the range of 17.89-18.1 MJ/kg. TGA results also indicates low moisture and ash content and the process of pyrolysis occurred at 137-550oC at 10oC/min heating rate. The activation energies and reactivities determined from TG/DTG curve are 72.01, 106.81 and 88.67 kJ/mol and 1.76 E+19, 5.1 E+06 and 3.92 E+05 for step I, II and III respectively. A water boiling experiment was carried out to evaluate the cooking efficiency of the pellets compared to fuel wood, kerosene and liquefied natural gas (LPG). The energy intensities and energy cost of 1.2, 0.78, 0.56 and 1.36 kJ/g of water and 0.2, 0.7, 0.4 and 0.2 Nigerian Naira (N) were calculated for fuel wood, kerosene, LPG and the pellets respectively. vii An economic analysis of fuel pellet production from Cassia tora stems has been carried out for conditions found in Kano state, Nigeria. The total production cost, for a base case scenario of 5t/h and operating for 270 days a year, is £4/tonne (1094.5 Naira/ton) of pellets. A ‘Willingness to pay’ analysis was also performed using the Contingent Valuation Technique. A structured contingent valuation questionnaire was administered to 420 randomly selected households in the Kano metropolis and Chi-square analysis was conducted on the data collected. The results of the analysis, at a 5 percent (0.05) confidence level, showed that p-values were less than 0.05 (0.05>p) for all the responded variables. It is confirmed, from the analysis, that an inadequate supply of energy is a statistically significant problem in Kano state and households significantly use fuel wood for domestic energy applications. The results also indicated the willingness of households to switch to a new product and were willing to pay a mean amount of £5 (1361.5 Naira) for a ton of the fuel pellets. Properties of the cassia tora pellets were found to be comparable with other biomass fuel pellets. It is recommended that policy and investment should be geared towards fuel pellet production in Nigeria, to address problems of energy poverty and environmental deterioration, and provide a means for further economic development.

Cette recherche traite des programmes hiérarchiques attribuant des statuts à ses membres (e.g. Gold, Silver,…). La littérature suggère la supériorité de ce design sur les programmes dits « linéaires » car ils apportent plus de considération aux clients ayant atteint un certain niveau de dépenses. Pourtant, si un consommateur baisse sa consommation, l’entreprise devrait le rétrograder au statut inférieur ; or la rétrogradation a des effets délétères sur les intentions de fidélité. Cette recherche tente de pallier cette limite en répondant à deux questions : comment inciter le client à conserver son statut ? Ces incitations contribuent-elles à atténuer les effets négatifs de la rétrogradation ? Les résultats de quatre expérimentations conduites auprès de 922 personnes dans deux secteurs d’activités ont permis de montrer qu’il est possible d’inciter les consommateurs à modifier leur comportement pour conserver leur statut en utilisant la communication persuasive, via (1) des stratégies préventives, (2) le cadrage, et (3) en tenant compte de l’intensité de l’effort à réaliser pour le client. Enfin, les résultats montrent qu’il est possible d’atténuer les effets de la rétrogradation mais que les stratégies testées ne permettent pas d’annihiler totalement ses effets sur le consentement à payer, les intentions de fidélité et de prosélytisme. / This research focuses specifically on hierarchical programs (e.g. Gold, Silver). Literature empirically demonstrates the superiority of this kind of design ; they bring more consideration to customers who meet predefined spending level. However, if a customer falls short of the required spending level, firms have to downgrade him to a lower status and we know that demotion has negative effects on loyalty intentions. This research attempts to overcome this limitation by answering two questions : how to get the customer to maintain his/her status? and can we eliminate the negative effects of demotion ?The results of four experiments conducted with 965 people in two different sectors have shown that it is possible to encourage consumers to change their behavior to maintain their status using persuasive communication via (1) prevention strategies, (2) framing and (3) by taking into account effort intensity. Finally, the results show that it is possible to mitigate the effects of demotion but the tested strategies fail to completely eradicate their effects on willingness to pay, loyalty intentions and word of mouth.

Customer's ever increasing bargaining power makes it particularly important that practitioners and researchers more thoroughly understand the complex nature of customer commitment. Not surprisingly, however, although the construct of commitment has emerged as one of the key constructs in relationship marketing and has been widely studied in literature, there has been very little agreement on the conceptualisation of the construct. Building upon relationship marketing and organisational behaviour literature, the aim of this research is to extend our understanding of the nature of customer commitment by developing a three-dimensional customer commitment model relaying on commitment theory from the organisational behaviour literature; affective desire-based (AC), calculative cost-based (CC), and normative obligation-based (NC). Relationships among the commitment dimensions and relationships with a number of loyalty relational outcomes, namely, intention to stay (ITS), word of mouth (WOM), and willingness to pay (WTP) were investigated in this study. Using survey questionnaire distributed among customers of cell phone services (N=525), the data was analysed by structural equation modeling (SEM) and then additional analysis was employed to further demystify the complexity of the commitment concept. The results suggest that AC is the dominant source that generates customer loyalty, in line with the state of literature. Both cost-based and surprisingly obligation-based have shown detrimental effects on maintaining and developing the customer-service provider relationship. Additional analysis with various scenarios was implemented using mean split as cut score for high/low commitment dimensions. The findings suggest NC turns to have important positive role on relational outcomes when both AC and CC are below the mean split. When both AC and CC are high NC negatively affect at least ITS but at the same time make a clear positive effect on WTP. The findings can be instructional for identifying how firms can bend various marketing sources to secure more loyal customers to the service provider.

Cette thèse aborde la question de la fiabilité du temps de transport. L’étude de la fiabilité du temps de transport trouve ses sources dans le fait que, dans bien des situations, le temps de transport n’est pas certain, mais aléatoire. De nombreux évènements peuvent en effet modifier le temps de transport prévu par les opérateurs ou espéré par les usagers. Par ailleurs, lors de l’évaluation socioéconomique de projets d’investissement en infrastructure de transport, il peut exister un arbitrage entre gain de temps et gain de fiabilité. Or, comme la fiabilité est encore à l’heure actuelle, difficilement intégrable dans ce type d’évaluation, ces projets d’investissement voient leur rentabilité collective sous-estimée conduisant à leurs reports. Il émerge ainsi trois problématiques majeures relatives à l’étude de la fiabilité du temps de transport : sa mesure, sa valorisation monétaire (i.e. la disposition à payer des individus pour améliorer la fiabilité du temps de transport) et enfin, sa prise en compte dans les analyses coûts-avantages. Un premier chapitre permet d’adapter les mesures usuelles de la fiabilité du temps de transport appliquées dans le cadre du transport routier, aux modes de transport collectif (fer et aérien plus particulièrement). Nous proposons également une nouvelle mesure de la fiabilité, le Delay-at-Risk (DaR) inspiré de la littérature financière. Le DaR est une transposition de la mesure de la Value-at-Risk (V aR) à l’économie des transports. Cette mesure est plus utile du point de vue des usagers pour la planification des trajets avec correspondance que les autres mesures. Le deuxième chapitre a pour principal objectif de déterminer la disposition à payer des individus pour améliorer la fiabilité du temps de transport. Nous proposons un cadre théorique inspiré de la théorie de la décision en univers risqué à partir duquel nous définissons la préférence des individus à l’égard de la fiabilité (i.e. reliabilityproneness) ainsi que la prudence. Nous développons des nouvelles mesures de la fiabilité du temps de transport, exprimées comme des primes de risque : la reliability-premium et la V OR. La reliability-premium détermine le temps de transport maximum supplémentaire qu’un individu est prêt à accepter pour supprimer l’intégralité du risque sur le temps de transport. La V OR, quant à elle, se définit comme la disposition maximale à payer d’un individu pour supprimer l’intégralité du risque sur le temps de transport. Par ailleurs, nous établissons également les conséquences sur la valeur du temps (V TTS) et de la fiabilité (V OR), de la prise en considération de l’attitude à l’égard du risque sur le temps de transport des usagers (aversion et prudence). Le dernier chapitre de cette thèse a pour objet d’intégrer la fiabilité dans les évaluations socioéconomiques de projet d’investissement et plus particulièrement dans la détermination du surplus des usagers. Nous mettonsen exergue un effet de diffusion des gains de fiabilité par rapport aux gains de temps. Ainsi, nous proposons des recommandations quant à l’arbitrage entre les projets générateurs de gain de temps et de gain de fiabilité en fonction des valeurs monétaires du temps (V TTS) et de la fiabilité (V OR). / This thesis deals with the issue of travel time reliability. The study of travel time reliability emerges from the fact that in many situations, travel time is random. Many events can change the travel time forecasted by operators or expected by users. Moreover, a tradeoff may exist between time and reliability benefits when evaluating socio economic appraisal of transport infrastructure. However, since reliability is still difficult to integrate in this type of evaluation, investment projects’ collective profitability is underestimated and often postponed. Thus, three main issues of travel time reliability analysis emerge: measurement, monetary valuation and implication for cost benefit analysis. This thesis is organized in three chapters. The first chapter adapts the measure of travel time reliability typically used in the road transport context to the collective modes (rail and air, in particular). We also develop a new reliability measure: the Delay-at-Risk (DaR). DaR is an implementation of the Value-at-Risk (V aR) measure into the transport economic framework. The DaR seem to be relevant and understandable information for the users, especially to plan their travel and avoid missing their connections. The main objective of the second chapter is to define the users’ willingness to pay to improve travel time reliability. We present a theoretical framework based on decision theory under risk. We introduce the concept of reliability-proneness (i.e. travel time risk aversion) and prudence. We develop new measures of travel time reliability expressed as risk premium: the reliability-premium and V OR. The reliability-premium is the maximum amount of additional travel time that an individual is willing to accept to escape all the risk of travel time. The V OR is defined as the maximum monetary amount that an individual is willing to pay to escape all the risk of travel time. Furthermore, we also establish the link with attitudes towards risks of travel time (aversion and prudence) and the impact of the value of travel time (V TTS) and the value of reliability (V OR). The final chapter of this thesis integrates reliability in investments project’s socioeconomic appraisal. More particularly, it allows to determine users’ surplus valuation. We highlight a diffusion effect of reliability benefits with regard to travel time benefits. Thus, we propose recommendations regarding the tradeoff between projects that generate time benefits compared with reliability benefits, according to the monetary values of travel time(V TTS) and reliability (V OR).

Changes in the features of food demand and consumption have moved from the mass consumption model towards an increasing qualitative differentiation of products and demand. This movement towards addressing consumers’ demand for food products with more advanced quality attributes has led to increasingly complex food qualification processes and a proliferation of standards. Accompanying these changes in the agro-food system is a growing consumer concern for food safety and quality. Even though these trends are also permeating South Africa, little research has been done on the local quality dynamics of this emerging country. There is therefore the need to investigate consumers’ food choice behaviour in a developing country context, such as South Africa. Consumers’ quality perception and decision making process regarding food products is quantified through measuring consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP)for a given attribute in a food product. Willingness to pay refers to the maximum monetary amount that a consumer is willing to pay for a specific product representing a bundle of product attributes. The general objective of this study is to test the application of experimental auctions as one of the available methods to measure consumers’ willingness to pay, in order to determine the applicability of experimental auctions to specific research scenarios – for example the case of food products with advanced quality attributes in a developing country context. Sample selection for the experiment was done through a combination of random and convenience sampling. The total sample amounted to 31 participants. The target population was high income, established South African consumers, who are regular consumers of red meat and also the main buyers of groceries in the household. A pre-auction survey was done to determine the exact demographic composition of the sample as well as gaining insight into the sample’s buying behaviour and attitudes towards red meat, specifically Karoo lamb. A random nth price auction was conducted to obtain willingness to pay estimates for a premium on certified Karoo lamb. Various demographic and behavioural variables were linked to participants’ individual bids in order to determine the possible influence of these variables on participants’ bidding behaviour. This research study tested the application of an experimental auction mechanism in the food marketing context of a developing country. To the knowledge of the researcher, it is the first study of its kind done in South Africa. It was worthwhile to investigate this method as an alternative to stated preference methods in the field of food choice behaviour, because the auction conducted during this research project succeeded in giving meaningful insights into the possibilities of the certification of meat of origin in a developing country like South Africa. From the auction results, a general positive willingness to pay for certified Karoo lamb was observed, with an average premium recorded of R10.90/500g of loin chops. The impact of additional information was clearly visible as bids increased substantially after information treatments about the product were introduced. It was found that female respondents and respondents from the older age group generally bid higher premiums for Karoo lamb. Respondents buying red meat and sheep meat (i.e. referring to mutton and lamb products) from Woolworths and Spar also indicated a higher positive willingness to pay a premium for certified Karoo lamb. With specific reference to the case study product, a positive willingness to pay for certified Karoo lamb was determined in this study. The concerns raised by participants about the lack of availability and authenticity of Karoo lamb, serves as an indication of the need for a formal certification process of food products in South Africa. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / unrestricted

The Florida Reef and associated human community form a unique socio-ecological system. While this system represents great value to society, it is exposed to high levels of vulnerability. Despite intense study of its elements, the system lacks conceptual integrity, its management is fragmented, and user valuation remains unclear. A survey using contingent valuation methods investigated stakeholders' attitudes and how much they are willing to pay for sustainable seafood, coral reef restoration, and research funding for coral reefs in southeastern Florida. Respondents expressed angst about climate change and reef conditions, and they connected reef degradation to land-based pollution and water quality. Regression analysis revealed status (income, education) as weak, indirect predictors of behavior, age as a moderating influence, and environmental and emotive factors as strong, direct predictors. One's relative attachment to ecosystems, such as coral reefs, is theorized as a motivation that displaces the expectations of traditional economic theory.