The growth of the Internet is increasing the deployment of e-services in such areas as e-commerce, e-learning, and e-health. In parallel, service providers and consumers are realizing the need for privacy. Managing privacy using privacy policies is a promising approach. In this approach, an eservice consumer and an e-service provider each have separate privacy policies. Before an eservice is en...

People consume not only physical goods but also social interaction, and consumer choices depend on both intrinsic motivations (preferences for consumption) and extrinsic motivations (how choices impact social interactions). In this paper, we study how social identity, preference, and utility from social interaction shape consumer behavior and choice in the marketplace. Our contribution is two-f...

The process of gradually finding an economic equilibrium, the so called tâtonnement process, is investigated in this paper. In constrast to classical general equilibrium modelling, where a central institution with perfect information about consumer preferences and production technologies (“Walrasian auctioneer”) organizes the economy, we simulate this process with learning consumer and producer...

Japan’s mobile phone market has been oligopolized by three incumbents who are seeking vertically integrated business models, which may prevent competitors from using platform layers to provide original services. We conduct two types of conjoint analysis to measure consumer-stated preferences and draw two main conclusions from the analyses. First, the average consumer is willing to pay more than...

Diary industry in China has been in deep crisis since a series of quality scandals were exposed to public in 2008. Thanks to the traceability system in dairy supply chain and the growth of the internet, providing traceable dairy product information to the public is viewed as one of the best ways, mostly in terms of feasibility, to overcome the trust crisis and to promote the development of the ...

It is often assumed (for analytical convenience, but also in accordance with common intuition) that consumer preferences are convex. In this paper, we consider circumstances under which such preferences are (or are not) optimal. In particular, we investigate a setting in which goods possess some hidden quality with known distribution, and the consumer chooses a bundle of goods that maximizes th...

With greater prevalence of social media, there is an increasing amount of user-generated data revealing consumer preferences for various products and services. Businesses seek to harness this wealth of data to improve their marketing strategies. Bundling, or selling two or more items for one price is a highly-practiced marketing strategy. In this paper, we address the bundle configuration probl...

Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers’ tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance choices varying in the number and types of contracts off ered. Then, we elicit individual risk preferences a...

Revealed preferences are tastes that rationalize an economic agent's observed actions. Normative preferences represent the agent's actual interests. It sometimes makes sense to assume that revealed preferences are identical to normative preferences. But there are many cases where this assumption is violated. We identify five factors that increase the likelihood of a disparity between revealed p...

It is well established that consumers infer value from scarcity, which Cialdini (1984) called the scarcity principle. We demonstrate the reverse of this effect of scarcity on perceived value – consumers infer scarcity of product supply from product attractiveness. We show that this effect arises from the operation of what we call “the value heuristic”. In addition, we show that the value heuris...