Consumer Behavior

Individuals behave differently when they know the objective probability of events and when they do not. The smooth ambiguity model accommodates both ambiguity (uncertainty) and risk. For an incomplete, competitive asset market, we develop a revealed preference test for asset demand to be consistent with the maximization of smooth ambiguity preferences; and we show that ambiguity preferences constructed fromfinite observations converge to underlying ambiguity preferences as observations become dense.

We make three points in response to Boyce, Daly, Hounkpatin, and Wood (2017). First, we clarify a misunderstanding of the goal of our analyses, which was to investigate the links between life satisfaction and spending patterns, rather than spending volume. Second, we report a simulation study we ran to demonstrate that our results were not driven by the proposed statistical artifact. Finally, we discuss the broader issue of why, in a world of big data, small but reliable effect sizes can be valuable.

We propose the anticipation-event-recall (AER) model. Set in a continuous time frame, the AER model formally links the three components of total utility (i.e., utility from anticipation, event utility, and utility from recall). The AER model predicts the temporal profiles of instant utility experienced before, during, and after a given event. Total utility is calculated as the integral of instant utility. The model builds on the psychological elements of conceptual consumption, adaptation, and time distance.

Consumers are often faced with the opportunity to purchase a new, enhanced product, such as a new phone, even though the product they currently own is still fully functional. The authors propose that consumers act more recklessly with their current products when in the presence of appealing, though not yet attained, product upgrades (not just mere replacements). Carelessness and neglect toward currently owned products stem from a desire to justify the attainment of upgrades without appearing wasteful.

Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject. This timely collection considers a range of ethical issues in business through the examination of anthropologically informed theory and case examples.

In this paper we show how simple text mining and semantic network analysis may be used to (i) improve our theoretical understanding of idea generation, (ii) help people improve the creativity of their ideas. From a theoretical perspective, we contribute to the cognitive idea generation literature by establishing a link between the set of concepts used to form an idea and the creativity of the idea. Each idea contains a subset of the semantic network of concepts related to the topic.

Today’s media landscape affords people access to richer information than ever before, with many individuals opting to consume content through social channels rather than traditional news sources. Although people frequent social platforms for a variety of reasons, we understand little about the consequences of encountering new information in these contexts, particularly with respect to how content is scrutinized.