No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to conduct a case study examining the intrusion of marketplace ideals on various aspects of everyday life. In this thesis, I provide a case study of a new business in San Francisco, ReservationHop, that transforms the previously first come, first serve restaurant reservation service into an auction style scalping (resell at a higher price) system, thereby affecting the distribution of an economic service, or good. In order to investigate this phenomenon, this thesis is organized into six main sections. First, I will provide a brief introduction to the thesis, presenting my aim and purpose in writing and why I believe that this is an important topic. I then introduce ReservationHop and describe the site and its business model, the controversy that it has evoked, and the app's creator Brian Mayer's attempts to defend the app's legitimacy. Thirdly, I will provide considerations in support of the ethical permissibility of the ReservationHop business model, using two neoclassical economic arguments: consumer choice theory and the Pareto-efficiency argument. Fourthly, I will counter these arguments, claiming that this service is not a Pareto optimal improvement because it involves deception, which is incompatible with genuine Pareto optimality. In the fifth section, I will introduce my main argument against ReservationHop in which I introduce the idea that there is something inherently wrong with the service even if its deceptive characteristics were corrected for. I argue that there should be "things that money cannot buy" because unfettered marketization erodes the nonmarket value of community, or commonality. In conclusion, this thesis argues that the intrusion of marketplace values on all aspects of society should be resisted, and that we must rethink the increased influence of marketization for it crowds out other important non-market values, e.g., our sense of community solidarity.

The study aims to understand the underlying factor why McDonald's customers return despite previous failure customer experiences. Why do customers come back to the company that contributes to the former dissatisfaction? McDonald's attempt to maintain unceasing purposeful emergence fail at the local level, where the customer contact occurs. McDonald's offerings and customers' bounded rationality results in that customers are satisfied with an "ok" experience, which adds to their low expectations of McDonalds. This makes clear that McDonald's does not have to make an effort through constant adaptation at the local level to achieve a "great" level of satisfaction. Because the customer is satisfied with an "ok" experience, and not require more to return to McDonalds. If you can lower your customers' expectations so much that they do not care about the previous failure customer experiences, the company's competitive invincible, even without continuous adjustment.

No description available.

Master of Science / Department of Landscape Architecture Regional and Community Planning / Huston Gibson / The provision of services in a community is often taken for granted, or done the way things have always been done. It is sensible to examine those practices to see if the system in place is advantageous to all parties involved. This paper examines the forms of municipal trash collection used in the United States and specifically Manhattan, Kansas. This examination includes a literature review of forms of solid waste collection and how informed vs. uninformed consumers act when purchasing goods and services. The specific traits of seven municipal trash service providers in Manhattan are analyzed. The findings of this project include a spread in prices that economic theory alone may not explain. These finding, supported by literature, would suggest that there is a breakdown in the transfer of information between service providers and consumers.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Graduate School of Business Administration, 201 / This dissertation examined the role of brands in consumer decision making in online environments versus offline environments. The effects of the information type and quality available in a given purchase environment influences consumer choice. The premise on which this study was based is the accessibility-diagnociticity model which states that the weight given to any piece of information which would be used for consumer decision making depends on the accessibility of that piece of information, the accessibility of alternative inputs and diagnositicity or perceived relevance of the inputs (Feldman & Lynch 1988). Information available to consumers plays a significant role in their decision making and there has been limited studies investigating this in the online versus offline shopping environments. The challenge of online shopping for some product categories is that there is limited capacity to provide touch, smell and taste information. The dissertation reports three experiments which were conducted to test the hypotheses. Participants were randomly assigned to different shopping environments with varying levels of information. The findings extend the theory of the diagnosticity of information (Alba, Hutchinson, & Lynch, 1991; Feldman & Lynch 1988; Herr, Karde, & Kim, 1991; Lynch, Marmorstein & Weigold, 1988; Lynch 2006) indicating that, when consumers observe that they do not have enough information to make a purchase decision, they do not make a decision unless the brand is familiar. vii The findings from the research offer fresh insights that familiar brands have greater advantage in online shopping than unfamiliar brands, particularly for experiential products. The results suggest that in purchase situations where there is limited sensory information, consumers rely on brand familiarity to make decisions or they do not make a decision if the brands are unfamiliar. The results of the dissertation showed that when there is limited information in consumer decision making processes, consumers use their knowledge about brands to make or not make a decision. The results contradict the long tail theory (Anderson, 2006) which proposes that the businesses would make more profits from niche offerings of unfamiliar brands. The results of the study were not conclusive on the effects of shopping environments on price sensitivity for familiar and unfamiliar brands. The results suggested the predicted pattern, though the interaction was not statistically significant and there is need for future research on online price elasticity. Future research should also explore the effects of these new sources of information like blogs, consumer and expert reviews, Facebook, etc. on consumer decision making in the offline and online environments

The ‘food desert’ has become a popular metaphor for describing fragmented pockets of America’s retail food environment characterized by limited access to affordable healthy foods and consequent heightened incidences of obesity and other diet-related health problems. Although researchers have addressed the locations and boundaries of food deserts, influential cross-sectional analyses are limited in that they cannot identify the direction of causality between the food environment and health outcomes. This study approaches the problem from an ecological perspective that examines the interplay between retailer and consumer in urban and rural settings of both food desert and non-food desert areas in the Texas South Plains centered on Lubbock. The principle methods of data collection entailed observations of purchases at full-service grocery stores and administration of a short survey as a means to determining what foods are being purchased and why. Additional semi-structured interviews with store representatives, along with several individuals located in underserved areas, and a general familiarization with the larger retail food environment, focusing on convenience and discount stores, provided important context to the research. The results challenge many existing assumptions, indicating problems associated with linking food deserts to poor health outcomes without accounting for additional variables, and further provides strong evidence that consumer choice is responsible for the larger retail food environment. / text

Increased scientific understanding of the links between nutrition and health has led to a demand for more nutrition information to be made available to consumers. Nutrition information is widely available on supermarket products but is rarely found in catering establishments. This research involved the provision of nutrition information in canteens and restaurants and studied the effect on consumer meal choices. A study was designed to find the optimum visual method of displaying nutrition information. Eight nutritional formats were systematically tested on customers in a shopping centre food court. Graphical formats displaying nutrition information in relation to current dietary advice relayed the nutrition information significantly quicker than, and as accurately as, tabular displays. A database system was developed to provide nutrition information on menu items making up a selected meal. A program suite was designed to enable the creation of recipes and menus. The nutritional breakdown of a selected meal was displayed to the customer who was then given the opportunity to change their meal before that meal was acquired. All initial choices and subsequent changes were recorded for analysis. Surveys carried out in two canteen locations (n=694) revealed that a significant percentage of customers (16%) did make changes to their meal after viewing the nutritional information on their first choice. Those who did not change were, on average, making "healthy" choices of meal. Those who did change made second choices which were, on average, significantly lower in energy, saturated fatty acids and non-milk extrinsic sugars than their first selections. Overall "healthier" choices were made with the second selection which did not differ significantly from the nutritional content of the meals chosen by those respondents who had not wished to change. Further research is necessary to determine whether the intention to change a selected meal as demonstrated by this research would be carried through by the respondents to the actual food selection.

<div> This study uses a choice experiment to investigate consumer preference for beef when faced with a tradeoff between increased animal welfare and lower levels of environmental impact. Results were obtained via an online survey consisting of 1,559 participants from the U.S. in Summer 2019. Participants were shown one of three presentation designs, as well as one of three information treatments (control, pro-environment, and pro-animal welfare). Consumers were shown to have significantly higher WTP for animal welfare attributes than environmentally friendly characteristics. </div><div>\par Participants which were shown the purely informational design regarded only price and whether the beef was grassfed and free of added growth hormones when choosing. The second presentation used sizing and coloring to convey environmental impact, producing higher WTP for environmental attributes and slightly lower WTP for animal welfare qualities. Participants in the third design were shown packages of ground beef with labels in place of the attribute levels. These participants had the least variance between attribute WTP and had 1.5-2 times greater WTP for a meat option than the other presentation treatments. </div><div>\par Pro-animal welfare information had the highest effect within the informational design, which had the highest overall WTP for animal welfare attributes. The visual presentation was influenced most heavily by the pro-environment information. Information treatments had no effect on the labels presentation.</div><div>\par While improvements in farm animal welfare might coincide with environmental improvements, the two issues can often come into conflict, particularly when it comes to greater intensification of production systems. This study aims to determine consumer preferences for ground beef when faced with a tradeoff between increased animal welfare and lower levels of environmental impact. A discrete choice experiment was conducted with over 1,500 U.S. consumers in mid-2019. Because of the high degree of consumer unfamiliarity likely associated with animal welfare and environmental impacts of beef production, we sought to determine the sensitivity of results by systematically varying how attributes were presented (textually, visually, or via labels) and what information was available to respondents (control, pro-environment, or pro-animal welfare). If shown only textual attribute information, consumers were unresponsive to environmental impacts such as land use, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions; these issues were more impactful when communicated visually or via labels. Using pictures of ground beef with labels significantly increased the odds one of the meat options was chosen relative to treatments that presented choices in tabular form. Avoidance of the use of added growth hormones was one of the preferable seven attributes studied. Providing pro-environment or pro-animal welfare information had small, but statistically significant impacts on consumer choice. Overall, results suggest consumers are willing to trade environment for animal welfare, but the extent of this tradeoff strongly depends on how the attributes are presented.</div>

This paper investigates whether East Asians are more likely than Westerners to purchase a brand presented as a best-seller given that East Asians tend to have a higher need for conformity and Westerners tend to have a higher need for uniqueness. Results show that East Asians are more likely than their Western counterparts to purchase such brands when the perceived risk is low. However, when the perceived risk is high, both East Asians and Westerners tend to prefer a brand presented as a best-seller. Results also show that, in a three-option set in which the C option is dominated by the B option but not by the A, both East Asians and Westerners are more likely to select option C when it is presented as a best-seller than when it is not. Managerial implications and the study's limitations are also discussed.