Advances In Household Economics Consumer Behaviour And Economic Policy

This book considers recent advances in household economics, consumer behaviour and economic policy and examines their interrelationship and impact on growth, development, trade and welfare policy in world economies in the 21st century. Researched and written by authorities in these emerging areas from North America, the European Union and Australia/Oceania, the book has the timely advantage of bringing together in one place the development of diverse concepts and important applications in these areas. It is a must-have for academics, and will be used on advanced courses on household economics and production, demand analysis, economic policy, social security and welfare economics. It will also be of interest to trade and welfare policy-makers world-wide.

This book applys insights from the fields of feminist, heterodox and behavioral economics to a study of consumption, focusing on its construction as a learned activity and a lifestyle choice.

Consumption forms a major part of people's lives. As such, geographers, historians of technology and sociologists have devoted much attention to trying to figure out what makes consumption meaningful. By contrast, economists have been content to hold onto theories of consumption that depend on a self-interested representative agent making utility maximizing decisions. Pietrykowski develops this alternative account through the recovery of past attempts to forge a different analytical approach to the study of consumption. In particular, theories of consumption espoused by home economists, psychological economists and Regulation school theorists are critically reviewed. These research projects, marginalized by the mainstream, are the precursors of contemporary scholarship in feminist, behavioural and radical political economics. Reclaiming this work greatly enlarges the scope for contemporary research in consumer behavior. Pietrykowski then provides a richly textured set of case studies of green automobility, slow food and alternative/local currency in order to explore the diversity of user cultures and to highlight resistant forms of consumer practice. By carefully interweaving historical and interdisciplinary research Pietrykowski creates a lively and incisive critique of mainstream economics This monograph will be of interest to academic economists, sociologists, historians and graduate students. In addition, the economics of consumption would also be of interest to readers in management, marketing and schools of business administration.

This volume presents selected articles from the 21st Eurasia Business and Economics Society (EBES) Conference, which was held in Budapest (Hungary) in 2017. The theoretical and empirical papers in this volume cover various areas of business, economics, and finance from a diverse range of regions. In particular, this volume focuses on the latest trends in consumer behavior, new questions in the development of organizational strategy, and the interaction of financial economics with industrial economics and policy.

The quick recovery of Asian economies from recent recessions in comparison to the struggling American and European economies can be attributed in part to the positive aggregate-demand externalities of their self-employment sectors. This book presents a behavioural analysis of this effect, with a detailed focus on producer households.

While this book contains numerous facts and empirical findings and touches on policy issues, its main contribution to the existing literature lies in the theoretical perspective it offers. The core of this book is a general equilibrium theory of labor and marriage presented in Chapter 2, which provides the conceptual framework for the rest of the chapters. Two major implications of the theory are sex ratio effects and compensating differentials in marriage. The book demonstrates how a few core concepts, linked via economic analysis, help explain a multitude of findings based on statistical analyses of data from a wide variety of cultures. It is hoped that readers of this book will improve their understanding of how marriage works to help us design better economic and social policies as well as help people live better and happier lives, making the book of interest to not only economists but sociologists and anthropologists as well.

This core textbook examines the economic paradigms at work in media industries and markets, enabling analysis of the media system as a whole. In addition to succinct accounts of neo-classical and critical political economics, this insightful text offers fresh perspectives for understanding media drawn from two 'heterodox' approaches: institutional economics and evolutionary economics. Applying these paradigms to vital topics and case studies, Stuart Cunningham, Terry Flew and Adam Swift stress the value – and limits – of contending economic approaches in understanding how the media operates today. Succinct and accessible, this text is essential reading for all students of media and communication studies, as well as those from economics, policy studies, business studies and marketing backgrounds with an interest in the media.