Toward a Sustainable Marketplace: Expanding Options and Benefits for Consumers

While popular interest in sustainable consumption continues to grow, there is a persistent gap between consumers’ typically positive explicit attitudes towards sustainability and their actual consumption behaviours. This gap can be explained, in part, by the belief that choosing to consume sustainably is both constraining and reduces individual-level benefits. While the belief that sustainable consumption depends on making trade-offs is true in some contexts, increasingly consumers are finding that more sustainable forms of consumption can provide both an expanded set of options and additional, individual-level benefits. In this essay, we discuss and illustrate an expanded set of options and benefits across the consumption cycle: from acquisition to usage and disposition. An underlying theme is the separation of material ownership from the extraction of consumer benefits across the consumption cycle. We believe that this ongoing evolution of products - and even business models - has the potential to simultaneously increase value to consumers as well as speed progress towards a more sustainable marketplace

Global, regional, and national burden of disorders affecting the nervous system, 1990–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021

BackgroundDisorders affecting the nervous system are diverse and include neurodevelopmental disorders, late-life neurodegeneration, and newly emergent conditions, such as cognitive impairment following COVID-19. Previous publications from the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factor Study estimated the burden of 15 neurological conditions in 2015 and 2016, but these analyses did not include neurodevelopmental disorders, as defined by the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-11, or a subset of cases of congenital, neonatal, and infectious conditions that cause neurological damage. Here, we estimate nervous system health loss caused by 37 unique conditions and their associated risk factors globally, regionally, and nationally from 1990 to 2021.MethodsWe estimated mortality, prevalence, years lived with disability (YLDs), years of life lost (YLLs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), with corresponding 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs), by age and sex in 204 countries and territories, from 1990 to 2021. We included morbidity and deaths due to neurological conditions, for which health loss is directly due to damage to the CNS or peripheral nervous system. We also isolated neurological health loss from conditions for which nervous system morbidity is a consequence, but not the primary feature, including a subset of congenital conditions (ie, chromosomal anomalies and congenital birth defects), neonatal conditions (ie, jaundice, preterm birth, and sepsis), infectious diseases (ie, COVID-19, cystic echinococcosis, malaria, syphilis, and Zika virus disease), and diabetic neuropathy. By conducting a sequela-level analysis of the health outcomes for these conditions, only cases where nervous system damage occurred were included, and YLDs were recalculated to isolate the non-fatal burden directly attributable to nervous system health loss. A comorbidity correction was used to calculate total prevalence of all conditions that affect the nervous system combined.FindingsGlobally, the 37 conditions affecting the nervous system were collectively ranked as the leading group cause of DALYs in 2021 (443 million, 95% UI 378–521), affecting 3·40 billion (3·20–3·62) individuals (43·1%, 40·5–45·9 of the global population); global DALY counts attributed to these conditions increased by 18·2% (8·7–26·7) between 1990 and 2021. Age-standardised rates of deaths per 100 000 people attributed to these conditions decreased from 1990 to 2021 by 33·6% (27·6–38·8), and age-standardised rates of DALYs attributed to these conditions decreased by 27·0% (21·5–32·4). Age-standardised prevalence was almost stable, with a change of 1·5% (0·7–2·4). The ten conditions with the highest age-standardised DALYs in 2021 were stroke, neonatal encephalopathy, migraine, Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, diabetic neuropathy, meningitis, epilepsy, neurological complications due to preterm birth, autism spectrum disorder, and nervous system cancer.InterpretationAs the leading cause of overall disease burden in the world, with increasing global DALY counts, effective prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation strategies for disorders affecting the nervous system are needed

Expert -Like Performance in Everyday Domains: The Effects of Thinking Styles and Problem Structure on Problem -Solving Performance

139 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.An examination of research on expertise reveals potential gaps in current conceptualizations. Examinations of expertise often involve problems in ill-structured domains, which require abstract problem solving. Thus, conceptualizations of expertise are characterized by the use of relatively advanced, abstract problem-solving skills. Problems in well-structured domains are often overlooked in examinations of expertise. This dissertation proposes a framework for expertise that describes expert-like performance from a problem-solving perspective, incorporating individual differences (e.g., learning styles, thinking styles) and problem structure. Specifically, aspects of consumer information (i.e., information format, information diagnosticity, and analogy distance) will be examined as ways in which information can be concretized, which in turn, lead to more well-structured problems.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Expert -Like Performance in Everyday Domains: The Effects of Thinking Styles and Problem Structure on Problem -Solving Performance

139 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.An examination of research on expertise reveals potential gaps in current conceptualizations. Examinations of expertise often involve problems in ill-structured domains, which require abstract problem solving. Thus, conceptualizations of expertise are characterized by the use of relatively advanced, abstract problem-solving skills. Problems in well-structured domains are often overlooked in examinations of expertise. This dissertation proposes a framework for expertise that describes expert-like performance from a problem-solving perspective, incorporating individual differences (e.g., learning styles, thinking styles) and problem structure. Specifically, aspects of consumer information (i.e., information format, information diagnosticity, and analogy distance) will be examined as ways in which information can be concretized, which in turn, lead to more well-structured problems.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Designing marketplace literacy education in resource-constrained contexts: Implications for public policy and marketing

This article describes the findings of an immersive program of field research on consumers living in poverty in South India and the lessons learned from the development and operation of educational interventions designed to enhance the marketplace literacy of these consumers. Whereas extant research and practice have traditionally addressed two key factors that facilitate market participation for the poor-market access and financial resources-the current research focuses on a third critical and complementary factor-namely, marketplace literacy. The authors contend that to sustainably benefit from enhanced market access and resources, (1) people living in subsistence conditions need to develop tactical or procedural knowledge, or concrete "know-how," regarding how to be an informed consumer or seller, and (2) this know-how must be grounded in conceptual/strategic knowledge, or "know-why" understanding, of marketplace exchanges. To that end, the educational program outlined begins by familiarizing participants with the purpose and logic of marketplaces and then transitions to the tangible aspects of how these marketplaces function. The article concludes with reflection on the implications for consumer policy, marketing research, and business practice