Qualifying types represent a new approach to modifying the behaviour of instances of other types in a general way, in the form of components which can be designed and implemented without a prior knowledge of the types to be modified or their implementations. This paper illustrates the idea by showing how they can be used to program various standard synchronisation problems, including mutual exc...

Technological advances increasingly provide marketers with the opportunity to empower consumers. Consumer empowerment is a positive subjective state evoked by consumer perceptions of increasing control. As a positive state, increasing consumer empowerment should be associated with increasing consumer satisfaction. If such a relationship exists, it may be influenced by a number of contextual var...

Despite the large impact that superstitious beliefs have on the marketplace, we currently know very little about their implications for consumer judgment and decision making. We document the existence of the influence of superstitious beliefs on consumer behavior and specify their conscious and nonconscious underlying properties. In particular, we show that superstitious beliefs have a robust i...

Switching between electronic and traditional markets, consumers nowadays impact profoundly on market makers. To successful conduct business, firms have to carefully making channel decisions to meet the needs of customers. The purpose of this article is to offer normative models for analyzing consumer channel selection behaviors between traditional and electronic markets. Referred to transaction...

Consumers’ attitudes to trust and risk are key issues in food safety research and attention needs to be focused on clearly defining a framework for analysing consumer behaviour in these terms. By creating a platform, or benchmark, it is hoped that more succinct policy programmes may be initiated to better communicate relevant issues to consumers. In order to achieve this, a detailed review of t...

This paper reports marketplace developments for consumer-driven health plans in spring 2002. Findings are from interviews with executives from start-up and health insurance firms, benefit consultants, employee benefit managers, Wall Street analysts, consumer organizations, thought leaders, and policymakers. We detail available evidence about the performance of consumer-driven health plans conce...

Research on consumer quality perception is reviewed using the Total Food Quality Model as a structuring device. The relationship between food safety and quality is addressed, and is discussed in the context of research on consumer risk perception. Quality and safety perception is linked to food choice and consumer demand, addressing questions of price perception and the validity of willingness-...

Background: Consumer ethical behavior has attracted much attention in recent years. However, most empirical research has focused on specific instances of ethical consumer behavior and ignored other ethical behaviors. This means a complete lack of understanding of the lifestyles of ethical consumers. In this article, while referring to the formation of ethical consumption, a full range of ethica...

A critical requirement of direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug promotion on the Internet is the concept of fair balance. This means that prescription drug Web sites should provide an accurate, balanced portrayal of the risks relative to the benefits of using prescription medications. However, one of the most pervasive findings in consumer research is that risk perceptions are often not aligned with th...

Consumers have recently become more concerned about food additives and food safety. Since its first meeting on September 17, 2003, the Risk Communication Expert Committee has studied and discussed the ideal methods to communicate risk related to food safety issues in response to a Food Safety Commission request. However, there are only a few case studies that actually apply to risk communicatio...