This chapter introduces a preference-based recommendation procedure in a green product information retrieval system. It constructs a green information management system based on data mining technology. Green products and relevant green regulations were collected and then integrated in a content-based and collaborative filtering method to provide a preference-based query interface for green prod...

Today, health care consumers are taking more control over their health care problems, investing more time in finding and getting information as well as looking for proper methods in order to investigate more closely the health care information received from their physicians. Unfortunately, in health care consumers' views, the trustworthiness of health authorities and institutions has declined i...

I this study, we examine how consumers respond to firms’ use of two types of information for personalization: product preferences and name. We collect a unique data set of over 10 million e-mail advertisements sent by a website to over 600,000 customers who could buy the advertised products from the online merchant. We estimate a two-stage hierarchical model using Bayesian analysis to account f...

We study the welfare effects of an increase in firms’ information about consumer naivete in a simple reduced-form model in which competitive firms can introduce distortionary fees that naive consumers ignore when making purchase decisions. We establish that our model captures many markets—including those for credit, banking, hotels, gambling, and mobile phones—in which consumer naivete has been...

We study the disclosure decision and price-setting behavior of competing firms in the presence of cursed consumers, who fail to be sufficiently skeptical about a firm’s quality upon observing non-disclosure of quality-relevant information. We show that neither competition nor the presence of sophisticated consumers necessarily offer protection to cursed consumers. Exploitation arises if markets...

Traditionally, producers faced a binary choice when channeling new technologies into consumers’ everyday lives. They pushed new science-based technology or adapted to often unimaginative market pull. The former isolated design from consumers, the latter from technology. The emerging information society aggravates the traditional trade-off into a dilemma. Many consumers fail to sufficiently comp...

INTRODUCTION Limited research has examined primary care providers' communication with patients about maintaining cognitive functioning. Our study's objective was to compare the perceptions of consumers and primary care providers related to beliefs and communication practices about lifestyle behaviors beneficial for overall health and for maintaining cognitive functioning. METHODS In 2009, we ...

The online infomediary, playing an important role in e-commerce, provides more unbiased and refined product information than usual advertisement provided by online retailers. Interestingly, depending on its capability, the quality of product information is likely to differ. Also, given the fact that it enables consumers to grasp market price dispersion of products, the context of online infomed...

eoclassical welfare economists maintain that consumers suf-N fer when risky goods are supplied in a n unregulated market. Consumers a r e said to possess imperfect information (Stiglitz 1988, pp. 78-79; Barr 1992, pp. 749-50) and limited ability to process complex information. Moreover, because information is presumed to be a public good, markets are ipso facto supposed to produce and dissemina...