Socializing, Shared Experience and Popular Culture

We argue that socializing is an important economic activity because it is vital to our well being, and that an important input into the activity of socializing is the set of experiences that is shared by the participants. Clearly, a person's experiences are generated, in part, by standard economic choices, and therefore the set of shared experiences in any social encounter is driven by the prior economic choices of individual participants. One implication is that these prior choices are not purely private since the utility that individual participants derive from a social encounter is linked to them. Our model of this link provides an explanation of a number of interesting phenomena, including certain sorts of conformity, the domination of one culture by another, and the existence of superstars.

Existence Advertising, Price Competition, and Asymmetric Market Structure

We examine a two stage duopoly game in which firms advertise their existence to consumers in stage 1 and compete in prices in stage 2. Whenever the advertising technology generates positive overlap in customer bases the equilib- rium for the stage 1 game is asymmetric in that one firm chooses to remain small in comparison to its competitor. For a specific random advertising technology we show that one firm will always be half as large as the other. No equilibrium in pure price strategies exists in the stage 2 game and as long as there is some overlap in customer bases the mixed strategy equilibrium is far from the Bertrand equilibrium.Existence advertising; price dispersion; Bertrand paradox; information; duopoly

Spam - solutions and their problems

We analyze the success of filtering as a solution to the spam problem when used alone or concurrently with sender and/or receiver pricing. We find that filters alone may exacerbate the spam problem if the spammer attempts to evade them by sending multiple variants of the message to each consumer. Sender and receiver prices can effectively reduce or eliminating spam, either on their own or when used together with filtering. Finally, we discuss the impli- cations for social welfare of using the different spam controls.Spam; filtering; email; receiver pricing; sender pricing

Developing an effective approach to measure emotional response to the sensory properties of beer

Emotion research in sensory and consumer science has gathered significant momentum over recent years and the development of effective emotion measurement methods is a priority in this rapidly growing area. The aim of this research was to advance the use of consumer-led emotion lexicons by using focus groups to increase the efficiency of lexicon generation and by decreasing the number of consumer response categories. In parallel, the ability of the newly generated reduced lexicon to discriminate emotional response across different gender and age groups, and across sensorially distinct beer samples, was evaluated. The new approach was largely effective at discriminating across samples and revealed significant differences in emotional response between genders and between age groups. The reduced lexicon was compared to a full lexicon to ascertain their relative efficacies. Whilst there were differences between the two form lengths, neither was convincingly more effective at sample discrimination than the other, although the full form better differentiated between age groups. The reduced form was also applied to cross-cultural comparisons through the generation of a reduced product-specific consumer-led emotion lexicon in Spain. As in the UK, the approach discriminated well between samples and was able to differentiate between consumer groups. Comparing Spanish and UK responses, ratings of emotions associated with pleasure/pleasantness were similar but there were differences in the use of emotions associated with arousal/engagement/activation. This new methodology was therefore demonstrated to be a valuable tool for investigating cross-cultural emotional response. The approach developed in this thesis provides researchers with an enhanced consumer-led emotion methodology for use with food and beverages. As well as being relatively quick, the approach has been proven to differentiate between products and reveal differences concerning emotional response across different consumer groups and between cultures. These attributes make this emotional measurement approach extremely valuable to this young research area

Unsuspected Perversities in the Theory of Location

On an infinitely-extensible plane (with uniform customer-density) the socially-optimal configuration of firms is a regular hexagonal lattice. Will the free market necessarily produce this configuration? We argue that the currently-accepted, affirmative answer has been erroneously derived from models in which equilibrium is undefined, and in which equilibrium conditions are asserted rather than being derived from behavioural postulates. We answer the question negatively, showing that, in a standard location model: (a) many configurations, including the hexagonal, satisfy the equilibrium conditions (and in no case is zero profits a necessary condition for equilibrium); and (b) if a hexagonal configuration is initially imposed, it is much less likely to persist through successive rounds of entry than is a square or a rectangular configuration.

Developing an effective approach to measure emotional response to the sensory properties of beer

Emotion research in sensory and consumer science has gathered significant momentum over recent years and the development of effective emotion measurement methods is a priority in this rapidly growing area. The aim of this research was to advance the use of consumer-led emotion lexicons by using focus groups to increase the efficiency of lexicon generation and by decreasing the number of consumer response categories. In parallel, the ability of the newly generated reduced lexicon to discriminate emotional response across different gender and age groups, and across sensorially distinct beer samples, was evaluated. The new approach was largely effective at discriminating across samples and revealed significant differences in emotional response between genders and between age groups. The reduced lexicon was compared to a full lexicon to ascertain their relative efficacies. Whilst there were differences between the two form lengths, neither was convincingly more effective at sample discrimination than the other, although the full form better differentiated between age groups. The reduced form was also applied to cross-cultural comparisons through the generation of a reduced product-specific consumer-led emotion lexicon in Spain. As in the UK, the approach discriminated well between samples and was able to differentiate between consumer groups. Comparing Spanish and UK responses, ratings of emotions associated with pleasure/pleasantness were similar but there were differences in the use of emotions associated with arousal/engagement/activation. This new methodology was therefore demonstrated to be a valuable tool for investigating cross-cultural emotional response. The approach developed in this thesis provides researchers with an enhanced consumer-led emotion methodology for use with food and beverages. As well as being relatively quick, the approach has been proven to differentiate between products and reveal differences concerning emotional response across different consumer groups and between cultures. These attributes make this emotional measurement approach extremely valuable to this young research area

Appetite: End of Year 6 report 2018 – 2019

Appetite is one of twenty-one current Arts Council England Creative People and Places programmes. This report focuses on the evaluation of Appetite’s programme of arts events and activity which took place between April 2018 and March 2019, marking the end of the second phase of the programme

Edible crabs “Go West”: migrations and incubation cycle of Cancer pagurus revealed by electronic tags

Crustaceans are key components of marine ecosystems which, like other exploited marine taxa, show seasonable patterns of distribution and activity, with consequences for their availability to capture by targeted fisheries. Despite concerns over the sustainability of crab fisheries worldwide, difficulties in observing crabs’ behaviour over their annual cycles, and the timings and durations of reproduction, remain poorly understood. From the release of 128 mature female edible crabs tagged with electronic data storage tags (DSTs), we demonstrate predominantly westward migration in the English Channel. Eastern Channel crabs migrated further than western Channel crabs, while crabs released outside the Channel showed little or no migration. Individual migrations were punctuated by a 7-month hiatus, when crabs remained stationary, coincident with the main period of crab spawning and egg incubation. Incubation commenced earlier in the west, from late October onwards, and brooding locations, determined using tidal geolocation, occurred throughout the species range. With an overall return rate of 34%, our results demonstrate that previous reluctance to tag crabs with relatively high-cost DSTs for fear of loss following moulting is unfounded, and that DSTs can generate precise information with regards life-history metrics that would be unachievable using other conventional means

Reflective practice for patient benefit: an analysis of doctors' appraisal portfolios in Scotland

Amended Embargo release date to 12 months from publication date