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DPSL

Economics, Finance, Business & Industry || Economics

The Active Consumer -Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice

Editor : Marina Bianchi

Master eBook ISBN10 : 0-203-02291-2

Master eBook ISBN13 : 978-0-203-02291-7

No of pages : 288

eBook Price : $200

Originally Published : 18 Jun 1998

The consumer is also a maker. Just like a producer, consumers inevitably and constantly find themselves transforming time, material resources, and market goods into something that is good for them. But what is good for them is not inscribed in the goods already available; it has to be discovered. Options and opportunities must be detected and exploited. The consumer is therefore also an entrepreneur, looking for ways to create and add value as well as differential advantage for him or herself. Novelty is an outcome of process; it is also a fundamental motivation for this activity. Consumers seem to delight in trying new solutions, exploring new combinatory possibilities.
Many of these facets of consumer behaviour are barely touched on in traditional economic theory, where the consumer's motivation is subsumed under an unanalysed preference set, the consumer simply responds passively to exogenous changes, and he or she never engages in producing change. Other literatures have taken up some of these themes, but not as a central concern, rather as insights from their separate disciplinary perspectives. This book makes these themes central. The book aims to provide an economic-theoretical understanding of the many ways in which innovation can structure consumer choice. The authors show from different points of view how central novelty can be in consumer behaviour, how it relates to technical change, how new consumer capabilities are developed and organized, or may involve the consumer in costly errors, how novelty dictates the multiple lives of products, and how desire for it can induce change in labour supply patterns. Conceptual and linguistic shifts needed to discuss consumption in this new light are also dealt with.



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Table of contents : 1. Introduction, Part 1 The Hedonics of taste: utility, novelty and change2. Choice without utility? Some reflections on the loose foundations of standard consumer theory 3. Economic change, choice and innovation in consumption 4. Taste for novelty and novel tastes: the role of human agency in consumption Part II Consumers as producers and problem solvers: consumption capabilities5. Cognition and innovation 6. The organization of consumption 7. Consumer goals a journeys into the unknown Part III Adoption and diffusion of new goods: illustrative analyses 8. Work and the sirens of consumption in eighteenth-century London 9. Silk purses out of sows' ears: mass rarefaction of consumption and the emerging consumer-collector 10. Novelty, imitation and habit formation in a Scitovskain model of consumption Part IV Consumption and communication 11. Consumption in postmodernity: social structuration an dteh construction of the shelf 12. On the consumption of signs


Contributor Information :Marina Bianchi, University of Cassino, Italy; Peter Earl, Lincoln University, New Zealand; Davide Gulaerzi, Padova, Italy; Guido Guerzoni, SDA Bocconi, Milan, Italy; Gabriele Troilo, SDA Bocconi, Milan, Italy; Richard N. Langlois, University of Connecticut, USA; Metin M. Cosgel, University of Connecticut, USA; Brian J. Loasby, University of Stirling, UK; Michael Hutter, Universitat Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany; Fabio Ranchetti, University of Pisa, Italy; S. Abu Turab Rizvi, University of Vermont, USA; Rajiv Sethi, University of Vermont, USA; Liisa Uusitalo, Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, Finland; Hans-Joachim Voth, University of Cambridge, UK


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