Intending to be ethical: An examination of consumer choice in sweatshop avoidance

While much research in ethical consumption has focused on contexts such as food, this research explores ethical consumer decision-making in the context of intention to avoid sweatshop apparel. This research seeks to deepen the Theory of Planned Behavior with respect to the motivation and volitional stages underlying behavior. The findings of the research, based on 794 consumers, are novel and support an enriched framework which reveals that the role of attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control are mediated by desire, intention and plan. The findings have implications for research seeking to address the ‘intention-behavior’ gap

Gravitational Higgs Mechanism

We discuss the gravitational Higgs mechanism in domain wall background solutions that arise in the theory of 5-dimensional Einstein-Hilbert gravity coupled to a scalar field with a non-trivial potential. The scalar fluctuations in such backgrounds can be completely gauged away, and so can be the graviphoton fluctuations. On the other hand, we show that the graviscalar fluctuations do not have normalizable modes. As to the 4-dimensional graviton fluctuations, in the case where the volume of the transverse dimension is finite the massive modes are plane-wave normalizable, while the zero mode is quadratically normalizable. We then discuss the coupling of domain wall gravity to localized 4-dimensional matter. In particular, we point out that this coupling is consistent only if the matter is conformal. This is different from the Randall-Sundrum case as there is a discontinuity in the delta-function-like limit of such a smooth domain wall - the latter breaks diffeomorphisms only spontaneously, while the Randall-Sundrum brane breaks diffeomorphisms explicitly. Finally, at the quantum level both the domain wall as well as the Randall-Sundrum setups suffer from inconsistencies in the coupling between gravity and localized matter, as well as the fact that gravity is generically expected to be delocalized in such backgrounds due to higher curvature terms.Comment: 16 pages, revtex; a minor correctio

Probing the Geometry of Warped String Compactifications at the LHC

Warped string compactifications, characterized by non-singular behavior of the metric in the infrared (IR), feature departures from the usual anti-de Sitter warped extra dimensions. We study the implications of the smooth IR cutoff for Randall-Sundrum (RS) type models. We find that the phenomenology of the KK gravitons (including their masses and couplings) depends sensitively on the precise shape of the warp factor in the IR. In particular, we analyze the warped deformed conifold and find that the spectrum differs significantly from that of RS, and present a simple prescription (a mass gap ansatz) which can be used to study the phenomenology of IR modifications to 5-d warped extra dimensions.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures; v2. typos corrected, references added, improved resolution of Figure

Extracting New Physics from the CMB

We review how initial state effects generically yield an oscillatory component in the primordial power spectrum of inflationary density perturbations. These oscillatory corrections parametrize unknown new physics at a scale $M$ and are potentially observable if the ratio $H_{infl}/M$ is sufficiently large. We clarify to what extent present and future CMB data analysis can distinguish between the different proposals for initial state corrections.Comment: Invited talk by B. Greene at the XXII Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, Stanford University, 13-17 December 2004, (TSRA04-0001), 8 pages, LaTeX, some references added, added paragraph at the end of section 2 and an extra note added after the conclusions regarding modifications to the large k power spectra deduced from galaxy survey

An Examination of the Volitional Stages in Consumer Decisions to Avoid Sweatshop Clothing

While much research in ethical consumption has focused on contexts such as food, this research explores ethical consumer decision-making in the context of intention to avoid sweatshop clothing where consumer concern has increased but response from the market remains limited. This research seeks to deepen the theory of planned behaviour with respect to the volitional stages underlying behaviour. The findings of the research support a modified theory of planned behaviour model and also reveal volitional stages from intention to trying and plan which reveal the stages of consumer decision-making to avoid sweatshop clothing. Implications for consumer decision-making are discussed

Anomalous U(1)_A and Electroweak Symmetry Breaking

We suggest a new mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking in the supersymmetric Standard Model. Our suggestion is based on the presence of an anomalous U(1)_A gauge symmetry, which naturally arises in the four dimensional superstring theory, and heavily relies on the value of the corresponding Fayet-Illiopoulos \xi-term.Comment: Latex, 11 pages, discussions and references adde