Patients and consumers

Successive governments of the UK have strongly supported two policies: an NHS free at the point of delivery, and the encouragement of consumer choice. It was natural for governments to think that amalgamating the policies would increase patient satisfaction, improve efficiency and save money. There are many reasons why this has not been well-received by patients and doctors and has not saved money, but the underlying problem is that there is a conceptual misfit between healthcare as public policy and as individual responsibility. Patients in the NHS cannot become consumers and doctors cannot become suppliers of goods and services

Nonrepresentative representative consumers

Representative consumers can be very Pareto inconsistent. We describe a cornmunity, with equal income distribution, where all consumers require 56 % higher aggregate income than the representative consumer requires in order to be compensated for the doubling of a price. Such large inconsistencies are ruled out if the representative consumer is homothetic, or if the consumers' income shares are fixed and all goods are normal. We show that optimality of the income distribution rule is not necessary for Pareto consistency of the representative consumer, and we give a weaker sufficient condition for Pareto consistency in cornmunities with two goods and two consumers

Educated consumers

Consumer behavior

Rational Consumers

The life cycle/permanent income hypothesis (LCPIH) makes two postulates: people behave with rational expectations, and people do not have self-control problems. If either or both of these postulates do not apply, we cannot obtain a testable implication of the LCPIH. We use Japanese panel data that include responses to self-reported and retrospective questions to elicit individual characteristics such as forward-looking behavior, experience of self-control problems, and use of commitment devices to overcome self-control problems. First, we test the rational expectations hypothesis and find that it holds for the whole sample. We then test the LCPIH implication and find that consumption does not change in response to expected income changes, which we restrict to fit the assumptions of the LCPIH. This result indicates that the LCPIH is a convincing model to account for the behavior of rational consumers who have rational expectations and no self-control problems. Our results also imply that responses to self-reported and retrospective questions are not meaningless when eliciting information on household characteristics.Life cycle/permanent income hypothesis; Excess sensitivity; Rational expectation; Self-control problems; sophisticated and naive.

Estonian consumers attitudes to organic food

The study of 740 Estonian occasional consumers has shown that 60 % of them are willing to buy organic products mainly because these contain fewer additives than conventional products. Therefore the consumers consider them first of all more natural and healthier. Preferred products are organic vegetables and fruits. Consumers prefer to buy them from supermarkets. Common awareness about organic farming needs improvement – only 11% of consumers felt themselves entirely informed

Consumers as tutors - legitimate teachers?

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to research the feasibility of training mental health consumers as tutors for 4th year medical students in psychiatry. METHODS: A partnership between a consumer network and an academic unit in Psychological Medicine was formed to jointly develop a training package for consumer tutors and a curriculum in interviewing skills for medical students. Student attitudes to mental health consumers were measured pre and post the program. All tutorial evaluation data was analysed using univariate statistics. Both tutors and students evaluated the teaching program using a 4 point rating scale. The mean scores for teaching and content for both students and tutors were compared using an independent samples t-test. RESULTS: Consumer tutors were successfully trained and accredited as tutors and able to sustain delivery of tutorials over a 4 year period. The study found that whilst the medical students started with positive attitudes towards consumers prior to the program, there was a general trend towards improved attitude across all measures. Other outcomes for tutors and students (both positive and negative) are described. CONCLUSIONS: Consumer tutors along with professional tutors have a place in the education of medical students, are an untapped resource and deliver largely positive outcomes for students and themselves. Further possible developments are described

COMMENTARY Enhancing consumer empowerment

Purpose of this paper: Much of the literature on consumer empowerment focuses on consumers’ efforts to regain control of their consumption processes from suppliers. Our purpose is to argue that many suppliers achieve success by trying hard to empower consumers. The mechanism by which this takes place consists of researching and providing what consumers want. Consumers feel empowered when they are able to enjoy the consumption process. This is of particular note in shopping, which is not simply obtaining products but also experience and enjoyment. Design/methodology/approach: Research is examined into the links between firms’ efforts to understand what consumers want, atmospheric stimuli, emotions and buying behaviour. Findings: We find that successful firms’ try hard to understand what consumers want and to improve consumer satisfaction and empowerment by providing pleasant marketing environments and apt, relevant information. Research limitations/implications: The approach is based on prior literature. We examine marketing to consumers in company locations, e.g. stores, malls, restaurants and banks to examine specific evidence of the effects of atmospheric stimuli such as aroma, music and video screen media. Practical implications: We contend that firms can and do become successful in a competitive arena by providing pleasant environments and information that people want. What is original/value of paper?: We show how consumer empowerment is an important concept. This paper contributes since there is a dearth of writings specifically about consumer empowerment in the marketing literature. Far from the popular view of consumers being manipulated by firms, successful firms try hard to and succeed in empowering consumers in their marketing activities

Combining Traditional Marketing and Viral Marketing with Amphibious Influence Maximization

In this paper, we propose the amphibious influence maximization (AIM) model that combines traditional marketing via content providers and viral marketing to consumers in social networks in a single framework. In AIM, a set of content providers and consumers form a bipartite network while consumers also form their social network, and influence propagates from the content providers to consumers and among consumers in the social network following the independent cascade model. An advertiser needs to select a subset of seed content providers and a subset of seed consumers, such that the influence from the seed providers passing through the seed consumers could reach a large number of consumers in the social network in expectation. We prove that the AIM problem is NP-hard to approximate to within any constant factor via a reduction from Feige's k-prover proof system for 3-SAT5. We also give evidence that even when the social network graph is trivial (i.e. has no edges), a polynomial time constant factor approximation for AIM is unlikely. However, when we assume that the weighted bi-adjacency matrix that describes the influence of content providers on consumers is of constant rank, a common assumption often used in recommender systems, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm that achieves approximation ratio of $(1-1/e-\epsilon)^3$ for any (polynomially small) $\epsilon > 0$. Our algorithmic results still hold for a more general model where cascades in social network follow a general monotone and submodular function.Comment: An extended abstract appeared in the Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), 201

Consumer Loss Aversion and the Intensity of Competition

Consider a differentiated product market in which all consumers are fully informed about match value and price at the time they make their purchasing decision. Initially, consumers become informed about the prices of all products in the market but do not know the match values. Some consumers have reference-dependent utilities—i.e., they form a reference-point distribution with respect to match value and price that will make them realize gains or losses if their eventually chosen product performs better or, respectively, worse than their reference point in both dimensions. Loss aversion in the match-value dimension leads to a less competitive outcome, while loss aversion in the price dimension leads to a more competitive equilibrium than a market in which consumers are not subject to reference dependence. Depending on the weights consumers attach to the price and the match-value dimension, a market with loss-averse consumers may be more or less competitive than a market with consumers that do not have reference-dependent utilities. We also show that consumer loss aversion tends to lead to higher prices if the market accommodates a larger number of ?rms