Religious Identity and Climate-Sustainable Behavior
by Zixin “Finnie” Zhao Abstract What motivates individual action on climate change? The study focuses on the potential influence of religious identities. It employs a laboratory experiment to investigate how priming religious identity affects individuals’ donation behaviors to climate versus non-climate charities in a dictator game setting. In contrast with expectations, this study finds no […]
Economic Situations and Social Distance: Taxation and Donation
by Alexander Brandt Abstract: This experimental study evaluated the effects of two common economic situations – taxation and donation – on the social distance between participants in the situations, an original effect of interest that is the opposite of prior research. This study employed a novel survey framework, in which subjects gave money to others […]
The Market for Apples: A Theory of Identity and Consumption
By Clement Lee This paper presents an economic model of the effects of identity and social norms on consumption patterns. By incorporating qualitative studies in psychology and sociology, I propose a utility function that features two components – economic (functional) and identity elements. This setup is extended to analyze a market comprising a continuum of consumers, whose identity distribution along a spectrum of binary identities is described by a Beta distribution. I also introduce the notion of salience in […]
How Consumers Make Impulse Purchases and the Influence of Peers and a Market-Based Setting
By Arjan Saraon Many organizations are designed to protect, educate and helping consumer with their financial decision–making. This paper examines the valuation of various non–essential goods in both a marketplace setting and slider–based setting, and in both a neutral influence and social influence condition. In a marketplace valuation setting, it is found that prices and price–searching behavior are the most significant predictors of a decision to checkout a good. In […]
