There is growing consumer interest in locally produced food and farmers and retailers play an important part in this growing niche market. Up-to-date and reliable data are necessary to create efficient distribution lines, but there is currently a dearth of aggregate data available to assess the distribution channels of local foods. The research questions for this thesis are motivated by the potential for growth in the local food market, and a need to investigate the role of consumer co-ops in achieving that potential. In Article 1, results from 67 surveys by consumer co-op managers and memberworkers from the American Northeast are reported. A conservative estimate for the Northeast co-ops’ contribution to the local food market is $21,253,750 annually, an average of 17.2% of co-ops’ expenditure being spent on local food. Article 1 identifies the consistency with which various food categories are sourced locally by co-op, and identifies the reasons for and barriers to sourcing locally. An ordinary least squares model reveals that the average percent locally sourced by co-ops whose mission includes sourcing locally is 12.7-percent higher than those whose mission does not include sourcing locally. No difference in percent locally sourced is found between co-ops from different settings (urban, suburban, rural), or Cooperative Grocer ranking (large, medium, small). Article 2 reports on the follow-up unstructured interviews with 58 co-op managers and member-workers. The five principal barriers to sourcing locally – locating local producers, co-op cooperation, organic certification, competition, and distribution – are discussed and various solutions that co-op managers have implemented are described. It is argued that co-ops act as local food hubs in the local food market, providing local producers with a year-round outlet for their products. Alleviating the specific barriers to sourcing locally will allow co-ops to achieve their potential in that role. Overall, improved communication among co-ops and between co-ops and farmers can begin to address some barriers to sourcing locally. Further, other groups such as NOFA, regional localvore groups, state agricultural extension agencies, and others can continue to facilitate communication and share pertinent information. It further suggests that filling some of the gaps can contribute to alleviating barriers identified by co-op managers and member workers. If co-ops are interested in sourcing more of what they sell from local producers, using percent of expenditure locally sourced as a marker can be useful for setting specific goals, while addressing the barriers to sourcing locally can help co-ops and producers meet these goals.

Thesis (M. Com. (Economics))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic & Business Sciences, 2017 / In this study, I use a computer game based lab experiment to investigate the existence of the Endowment Effect. Previous empirical evidence has been criticised for failing to adequately account for the effects of transactions costs and other frictions. The structure of the game used in this study allows me to control for these effects, and the results provide evidence in support of the existence of an Endowment Effect. The effect is found to be stronger when transactions costs are present. / GR2018

Thesis advisor: Juliet B. Schor / In an era of increasing awareness about the impacts of everyday consumption on ecological sustainability, this study investigates the factors that influence mothers' selection of household cleaning products. The data for this study are from 28 in-depth interviews with mothers who maintain diverse preferences across a cleaning product profile spectrum. Incorporating the concepts of risk, trust, and convenience, the analysis highlights the ways in which considerations of ecological health in relation to cleaning products influence purchasing decisions of some participants but not others. This study contributes to understandings of how consumer practices shift toward environmental sustainability. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

The ways in which individuals act within the world around them and the ways in which individuals engage with commodities as consumers play a vital role in providing insight into innate human values and opportunities for growth. By exploring the seemingly mundane and small but meaningful ways individuals engage in the consumer process and space, fruitful data display an interconnected outline of cyclical pathways toward mending the gap between reality and desired individual values, identity, and behaviors. Building on literature from both sociological and adult learning fields, diverse avenues for decision making and strategic outcomes are highlighted to isolate an array of individual consumer experiences and subsequent triggers for ongoing learning and reflection. While consumer research has an extensive theoretical history, by dissecting the nuanced nature of the individual experience, this literature adds a vital layer to the evolving consumer narrative by integrating the hidden fruit of perceived failure. To achieve this, an exploratory study was designed to dissect the lives of 20 individual consumers and their experiences with the intersectionality between their values, identity, and learned consumption behaviors. Several prevalent findings of the study included the identification of self-directed learning as a driving force for enacting agency and lifelong development, the essential nature of motivational drivers that sustain overt and covert degrees of commitment to individual values and the vital presence of coping mechanisms as accessible entry points to engage with the identification and confrontation of shifting values and identity. By tracing socialized behaviors through seemingly mundane acts of consumerism, individuals unlock opportunities to evolve through the increased exposure of varying experiences of others. As such, by adopting practices grounded in radical transparency with self, innate barriers to aligned behaviors can transform into stepping stones for growth, deep renewal, and empowerment. Thus, by capturing identities and values in action, this narrative displays a portraiture of the distorted consumer space and the individuals that consume and are consumed within it.

Photocopy of typescript. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

The paper presents a review of 128 studies on the behavior of older consumers published in the last 35 years (from 1980 to 2014) in 35 peer-reviewed journals. The purpose of the procedure is twofold: First, we aim to summarize results on agerelated changes in consumer research. Second, by doing so, we evaluate the relative importance of age-related factors (chronological, biological, psychological, and social age as wells as life events and life circumstances) in research on older consumers. Results of the review show that research on older consumers is still dominated by investigations using chronological age. Influences of other aspects of the aging process, although recommended by previous research reviews and providing valuable insights, are still playing a minor role in the investigation of consumer behavior. Research with alternative age measures is still in an early, exploratory stage and future studies should include specific aspects as well as multitheoretical models of aging.

In these essays, I study how multidimensional private information causes advantageous selection in a highly concentrated consumer credit market. All three chapters are tightly correlated with each other. I first carefully investigate conditional correlations between choices of a loan type, private default risks, and an additional private information on consumption smoothing motives. I find that their conditional correlations appear consistent with advantageous selection being driven by unobserved heterogeneity in consumption smoothing motives. Then I document how moral hazard links two dimensions of private information: consumption smoothing motives and default risks. By separately identifying moral hazard from adverse selection, I show that consumers with stronger consumption smoothing motives exert more effort to prevent default, generating an endogenous negative association between consumption smoothing motives and default risks. Finally, using a dynamic model of loan type choices and following outcome of default, I recover the joint distribution of bi-dimensional unobserved heterogeneity. This structural estimation also suggests a new way to estimate the inter-temporal elasticity of substitution that represents heterogeneous consumption smoothing motives. As well as being consistent with the results of previous chapters, the results of the structural estimation reveal a strong and positive correlation between inter-temporal elasticity of substitution and default risks.

Cheng Yuet Yee. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-44). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / ABSTRACT (ENGLISH) --- p.i / ABSTRACT (CHINESE) --- p.ii / ACKNOWLEDGEMENT --- p.iii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iv / LIST OF TABLES --- p.v / INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / LITERATURE REVIEW --- p.3 / Definition of Loyalty Programs --- p.3 / Background of Loyalty Program Research --- p.3 / Structural Elements of Loyalty Programs --- p.5 / Extension of Consumer-Focused Loyalty Program Research --- p.13 / THEORETICAL FRAMWORK --- p.15 / Motivation as a Function of Goal Distance --- p.15 / Goal Mechanism --- p.17 / EXPERIMENT ONE --- p.21 / Overview --- p.21 / Scenarios --- p.21 / Measures --- p.23 / Results --- p.23 / Discussion --- p.24 / EXPERIEMNT TWO --- p.26 / Overview --- p.26 / Results and Discussion --- p.26 / GENERAL DISCUSSION --- p.32 / Summary of Findings --- p.32 / Theoretical Implications --- p.32 / Managerial Implications --- p.36 / Limitations --- p.36 / APPENDIX (Sample Scenarios) --- p.39 / Condition: Early Stage (one stamp) and Unit Value Absent --- p.39 / Condition: Late Stage (eight stamps) and Unit Value Present --- p.40 / REFERENCES --- p.41

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Corporate Social Responsibility has grown in importance of the present society and therefore becomes a meaningful operation for companies today. Since the society is structured by consumers, companies have been forced to adapt this concept in their work, by the reason of keeping and gaining the consumers. For companies to be able to do so, they have to understand their customers and be aware of the different consumers purchase intention. These intention have shown to differ in regard of different industries, which is why this study have chosen to focus on the food industry, where the criticisms for the CSR initiatives are high. Consequently, the purpose of the study is to describe how consumers’ in the food industry perceive CSR and to explore how the perceived CSR affects their purchasing intention. Two research questions were made and to be able to answer these, relevant theories was established. The research was conducted using a quantitative study and a descriptive approach to analyze the collected data. The collection of data was made through nine interviews, divided into three involvement level for the reason of including all kinds of consumers. The results found that the general brand appearance is reflected in the companies’ products and therefore made their purchase based on this. The consumers perceived it hard to gain credible knowledge of companies CSR which leads them to make their purchase based on responsible certified labelling or recognition of the products instead. The consumers have a higher credibility for the negative information about companies. They therefore acts with CSR as a purchase criterion of this as they exclude products from this kind of companies. The consumer did however not act with CSR as a purchase criterion if the price was too high, as this was of a greater importance than CSR for the consumers. Because of the low information level and the low credibility, the consumers rather makes their decision based on what they perceive as less irresponsible instead of what they perceive as responsible. Keywords: CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility, Consumer perception, Consumer awareness, Consumer values, Consumer attitudes, CSR purchase criterion