This paper models an agent who has a limited capacity to pay attention to information and thus conditions her actions on a coarsening of the available information. An optimally inattentive agent chooses both her coarsening and her actions by constrained maximization of an underlying subjective expected utility preference relation. The main result axiomatically characterizes the conditional choi...

Choices of retirement income stream products pose the usual challenges associated with credence goods. Moreover, high perceived (and actual) risk, irreversibility of most purchases, high expenditure, little opportunity for social learning and distant consequences make these choices even more intimidating to consumers. Nevertheless, governments worldwide have started to shift more responsibility...

BACKGROUND Contemporary food systems are vast and complex, creating greater distance between consumers and their food. Consequently, consumers are required to put faith in a system of which they have limited knowledge or control. Country of origin labelling (CoOL) is one mechanism that theoretically enables consumer knowledge of provenance of food products. However, this labelling system has re...

We introduce a simple solution to help consumers manage choices between healthy and unhealthy food options: vice-virtue bundles. Vice-virtue bundles are item aggregates with varying proportions of both vice and virtue, holding overall quantity constant. Four studies compare choice and perceptions of differently composed vice-virtue bundles relative to one another and to pure vice and pure virtu...

The central premise of this paper is that information search on the Internet is increasingly difficult, and price comparisons are next to impossible in many cases. Consumer decision making is a complex process with a great array of influencing factors, price being one of them. We look into the consumer decision making process and identify the factors affecting consumers’ shopping behavior and c...

The optimal product design problem, where the ‘‘best’’ mix of product features are formulated into an ideal offering, is formulated using ant colony optimization (ACO). Here, algorithms based on the behavior of social insects are applied to a consumer decision model designed to guide new product decisions and to allow planning and evaluation of product offering scenarios. ACO heuristics are eff...

Few studies have been performed to use the detailed healthy eating index (HEI) to estimate consumer demand for diet quality. In this article, we apply household production theory to systematically estimate consumer demand for diet quality using the HEI developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The results show that consumers have insufficient consumption of food containing dark green and...

We review progress and challenges relating to scientific and applied goals of the nascent field of consumer neuroscience. Scientifically, substantial progress has been made in understanding the neurobiology of choice processes. Further advances, however, require researchers to begin clarifying the set of developmental and cognitive processes that shape and constrain choices. First, despite the ...