During the next decade, many African countries will almost certainly become more politically and economically stable. An increase in the amount of foreign private investment as well as the blossoming of local entrepreneurship will inevitably follow. When this happens, government and private institutions will face obstacles of a different kind. As in most developed economies, the focus will chan...

The study identified a sub-group of respondents adopting a negative response style in consumer tendency surveys and investigated their influence on aggregate household inflation expectations. Households prone to negative response style were identified using multi-group latent class models. The data source was the State of the Household Survey, conducted following European Commission methodology...

Policymakers, firms, and investors closely monitor traditional survey-based consumer confidence indicators treat them as an important piece of economic information. To obtain a daily nowcast monthly confidence, we introduce latent factor model for the vector sentiment embedded in media news articles. The proposed mixed-frequency dynamic uses Toeplitz correlation matrix to account serial high-fr...

This study extends previous research on service quality in the private passenger automobile insurance industry by providing empirical evidence using an improved proxy for the value of service. The endogeneity of the value of service is recognized and treated statistically with the two-stage least squares approach. The empirical model also includes a number of control variables that affect the s...

In this paper, we investigate the link between the formal definition of confidence in tendency surveys and its measurement. We advocate for the use of reflective measures in an assessment of the confidence level in both consumer and industrial indicators. Based on the data from Poland's tendency survey research, we use a multi-group confirmatory factor analytical approach to demonstrate that th...

Consumer choices affect sustainability of societal systems, and state governments increasingly are interested in environmental impacts of consumption. This article describes a Consumer Environmental Index (CEI) to track the impacts of product purchase, use, and disposal and applies this initial CEI to Washington State in the United States. CEI has modules for product and service use, upstream r...

The current paper describes research focusing on the Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey. Over the years, data analysis has indicated that this survey may be underestimating expenditure levels (Gieseman,1987). This, combined with the fact that researchers increasingly depend on surveys as a fundamental source of data (Anderson, Kasper, and Frankel, 1979)leads us to investigate ways to improve...

Happiness studies show that there has been no discernable rise in happiness in the United States between 1959 and 2004, yet the same period saw per capita income nearly triple. Dwight Lee modifies the theory of consumer demand to resolve this apparent conflict. Using the concepts of consumer surplus and rising incomes causing demand shifts, Lee posits that the law of downward sloping demand onl...

FOOD REFORMULATION: Reformulation of foods is considered one of the key options to achieve population nutrient goals. The compositions of many foods are modified to assist the consumer bring his or her daily diet more in line with dietary recommendations. INITIATIVES ON FOOD REFORMULATION: Over the past few years the number of reformulated foods introduced on the European market has increased e...

Electronic word of mouth is available to customers in different types of online consumer reviews, which can be used to help them make e-commerce purchasing decisions. Customers acknowledge that online consumer reviews help them to determine eWOM credibility and to make purchasing decisions. This study uses surveys and multiple regression analysis to create an extended Elaboration Likelihood Mod...