Consumer Behavior

Consider a firm that sells products over repeated seasons, each of which includes a full-price period and a markdown period. The firm may deliberately understock products in the markdown period to induce high-value customers to purchase early at full price. Customers cannot perfectly anticipate availability. Instead, they use observed past capacities to form capacity expectations according to a heuristic smoothing rule. Based on their expectations of capacity, customers decide to buy either in the full-price period or in the markdown period.

This article discusses the underlying dynamics behind the present debate over net-neutrality, analyzes the pro's and con's, concludes that the debate is based on false premises, and proposes a better solution — end-user sovereignty — that is both open and only lightly regulated.

More and more firms are engaging in greenwashing, misleading consumers about their environmental performance or the environmental benefits of a product or service. The skyrocketing incidence of greenwashing can have profound negative effects on consumer and investor confidence in green products. Mitigating greenwashing is particularly challenging in a context of limited and uncertain regulation.

Engaging the public with climate change has proved difficult, in part because they see the problem as remote. New evidence suggests that direct experience of one anticipated impact — flooding — increases people's concern and willingness to save energy.

This article considers scientific and public understandings of climate change and addresses the following question: Why is it that while scientific evidence has accumulated to document global climate change and scientific opinion has solidified about its existence and causes, U.S. public opinion has not and has instead become more polarized? Our review supports a constructivist account of human judgment.

Global climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.

Several researchers have proposed models of buyer behavior in noncontractual settings that assume that customers are "alive" for some period of time and then become permanently inactive. The best-known such model is the Pareto/NBD, which assumes that customer attrition (dropout or "death") can occur at any point in calendar time. A recent alternative model, the BG/NBD, assumes that customer attrition follows a Bernoulli "coin-flipping" process that occurs in "transaction time" (i.e., after every purchase occasion).