Labelling of quality and price is an important key for selecting goods or services. False or misleading representations may sway consumers into buying goods or services that are actually poor quality or overvalued. The Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations prohibits such misleading representations. The Consumer Affairs Agency is addressing to ensure proper environment for shopping according to the Act.
Delve - Fake Compliance as a Service - Part I
How Delve managed to falsely convince hundreds of customers they were compliant and then lied about it when exposed and called out
Delve - Fake Compliance as a Service - Part I
How Delve managed to falsely convince hundreds of customers they were compliant and then lied about it when exposed and called out
Restoring Consumer Sovereignty: How Markets Manipulate Us and What the Law Can Do About It
Abstract. For decades, there has been broad consensus within antitrust, intellectual property, and consumer law scholarship that consumers make decisions i
A Duty of Loyalty for Privacy Law
Data privacy law fails to stop companies from engaging in self-serving, opportunistic behavior at the expense of those who trust them with their data. This is a
Testing data quality effectively
Learn how focusing on user value and trust gives you a clearer, more effective way to test data quality
How Documentation Affects API Quality
If quality depends on consumers' perception, how can API documentation influence it?
Tightwads and Spendthrifts
Abstract. Consumers often behave differently than they would ideally like to behave. We propose that an anticipatory pain of paying drives “tightwads” to s
When Convenient Illusions Hold Precedence...
Language, Substance, and Money are intermediaries which crumble under weight of inspection
Restoring Consumer Sovereignty
For decades, there has been broad consensus within antitrust, intellectual property, and consumer law scholarship that consumers make decisions in their own best interests by consciously weighting the market’s relative prices, quantities, and qualities against each other. That consensus is unraveling in light of novel findings from cognitive and social psychology that explain how individuals’ concepts of what they prefer drive the global economy. At the same time, producers nowadays no longer merely satisfy consumers’ needs but also communicate their values, identities, and aspirations through the sale and marketing of products. As part of the growing interest in observations such as these, a wealth of psychological studies challenge the fundamental teaching of economics that the interplay of demand and supply of goods in a free market economy provides us with material wealth. This book provides a normative defense of that assumption and a theoretical framework for understanding its contradictions. It argues that the erosion of consumer sovereignty through the ability of product manufacturers and sellers to systematically take advantage of individuals’ psychological weaknesses demands a twenty-first-century reconceptualization of the consumer and a modern account of how the law should regulate the digital economy. Such an account is justified to ensure a diverse marketplace in which consumers can influence how our societies are structured and arranged. By examining the role that market manipulation plays, it offers ingredients for a realistic descriptive and normative market regulatory theory that is aware of its political economy, its behavioral suppositions, and its distributional consequences.
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time
Consumers’ Mental Representation of Expenditures: Implications for Spending and Saving Decisions
People’s mental representation of expenditures is crucial to how they budget. We propose that much like how people represent natural kinds (e.g., animals and pl
Value and vulnerability: a framework for understanding the complexity of misinformation use
Why does misinformation influence some and not others? Vulnerability is often mischaracterized as personal weakness or deficiency, or as susceptibility to “infection” or “pollution”—dehumanizing descriptions that highlight supposed shortcomings of media consumers. We propose a broader perspective that focuses on the value of misinformation to persons, groups, and platforms that adopt or share it. The Vulnerability and Value (VV) framework conceptualizes vulnerability as arising from interconnected scales and systems of valuation. Using a complex adaptive systems framing, we describe how misinformation can generate value for individuals, groups, and platforms. When misinformation spreads successfully, it often does so because it serves purposes that extend beyond veracity. Its spread indicates something significant is at stake for those who believe or facilitate it. A key contribution of the VV framework is to formalize the tradeoff individuals face: whether to question and evaluate misinformation or to accept and share it.
Worse on Purpose
Investigative essays on corporate enshittification — how the brands you trusted made everything worse on purpose, and who profits when they do.
Measuring the Hedonic and Utilitarian Dimensions of Consumer Attitude
This article reports the development and validation of a parsimonious, generalizable scale that measures the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions of consumer attitudes toward product categories and different brands within categories. The hedonic/utilitarian (HED/UT) scale includes ten semantic differential response items, five of which refer to the hedonic dimension and five of which refer to the utilitarian dimension of consumer attitudes. The authors conducted six studies to establish the unidimensionality, reliability, and validity of the two HED/UT subscales. In reaching the final scale, the authors also develop and implement a unique process of paring down a psychometrically sound but otherwise too large set of items. Nomological validity is established by replacing a typical, one-dimensional attitude toward the brand measure with the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions in a central route processing model. Results suggest that the hedonic and utilitarian constructs are two distinct dimensions of brand attitude and are reliably and validly measured by the HED/UT scale.
