Universities globally are showing increased interest in the potential of social media as a marketing recruitment tool. This paper explores how and why potential postgraduate business students looking to study internationally use social media in their educational decision-making process. Due to a lack of existing research, this study adopted an…

The behavioral perspective model's (BPM; Foxall, 1990) retailing literature is built on extensive empirical research and techniques that were originally refined in choice experiments in behavioral economics and behavior analysis, and then tested mostly on British consumer panel data. We test the BPM in the context of Norwegian retailing. This…

We consider a version of an optimal stopping problem, in which a customer is presented with a finite set of items, one by one. The customer is aware of the number of items in the finite set and the minimum and maximum possible value of each item, and must purchase exactly one item. When an item is presented to the customer, she or he observes its…

We analyze discrimination against less attractive people on a TV game show with high stakes. The game has a rich structure that allows us to disentangle the relationship between attractiveness and the determinants of a player's earnings. Unattractive players perform no worse than attractive ones, and are equally cooperative in the prisoner's…

This paper describes a course development project designed to address the obligation of consumer goods companies to engage in socially responsible advertising and promotion. Course development was informed by stakeholder theory. Videotaped interviews with 46 stakeholder representatives were integrated into the course, providing students with an…

Over the past several decades, researchers have used economics to understand a number of issues in education policy. This article argues that some education researchers have defined economics too narrowly, neglecting several areas of economics research that cut across disciplinary boundaries. One subdiscipline of economics that might be of use in…

This essay examines the possibilities of being/becoming an ethical researcher in the academy. It tackles this task through the lens of an ethics application by Mary [pseudonym], a PhD student in sociology whose research thesis was investigating the reasons why married men with children use prostitutes. Two analyses are offered of Mary's story. The…

A new phenomenon on Facebook, resulting from social media revolution, is the emergence of numerous Facebook fan pages. This form of online brand community is an effective tool for building relationships with consumers. Many hospitality firms (i.e. restaurants) have captured the strength of a fan page because it can enhance brand attractiveness and…

This dissertation research studied how different degrees of knowledge of online security risks affect B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce consumer decision making. Online information security risks, such as identity theft, have increasingly become a major factor inhibiting the potential growth of e-commerce. On the other hand, e-commerce…

This dissertation studies consumer search behavior in markets where buyers have incomplete information about available goods, such as markets with many sellers or frequently changing prices. In these markets, consumers engage in costly search in order to collect information necessary for making a purchase. Our method of investigation combines…

Recommender systems aim to support users in their decision-making process while interacting with large information spaces and recommend items of interest to users based on preferences they have expressed, either explicitly or implicitly. Recommender systems are increasingly used with product and service selection over the Internet. Although…

The purpose of the research was to analyse students' behaviour in choosing a distance learning program at Universitas Terbuka (UT), Indonesia, using the theory of planned behaviour model developed by Fishbein and Ajzen (1975). The respondents of the research were 102 students from 3 Regional Offices of Jakarta, Malang and Kupang, representing…

The purpose of this study was to investigate Singaporean consumers' decision-making styles (shopping styles) for sports products. This study used a scale of the Purchaser Style Inventory for Sport Products (PSISP) to identify if the scale was reliable. An instrument, consisting of 42 items under 9 dimensions, was administrated to 234 college…

The role of causal beliefs in people's decisions when faced with economic problems was investigated. Two experiments are reported that vary the causal structure in prisoner's dilemma-like economic situations. We measured willingness to cooperate or defect and collected justifications and think-aloud protocols to examine the strategies that people…

We report the results of a qualitative research study conducted with university students regarding their phenomenological perspectives of BlackBerry use. Three key themes inductively emerged throughout the interview and analysis process regarding self-perceptions college students reported regarding their own BlackBerry use. First, students offered…