Journal of Consumer Affairs最新文献

This study explores the impact of COVID-19-related job loss on early retirement withdrawals, highlighting the roles of financial hardships, subjective well-being, financial knowledge, and emergency savings. Drawing from 2929 respondents, the research identified that job loss increases early withdrawals, both directly and through financial hardships and well-being perceptions. Notably, individuals with greater financial knowledge and at least 3 months of emergency savings experience less negative impact from job loss. Our findings emphasize the vital role of employers in offering workplace financial education and promoting emergency savings. This aligns with the SECURE 2.0 Act's strategies and underlines the significance of financial readiness in buffering against the economic fallout of unexpected events like the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this study, we partnered with a large credit union to conduct a 10-arm field experiment aimed at reducing delinquent payments on installment debts. This experiment tested common behavioral interventions such as payment reminders against more novel approaches such as magnet reminders and savings accounts that automated emergency savings. It also tested the impact of offering financial counseling services. Our findings indicate that the email reminders—which emphasized resolving current delinquencies in some treatments and preventing future delinquencies in others—were effective at reducing moderate and severe payment delinquency rates. Other, more intensive treatments, which required participants to enroll in a new account or financial counseling, likely did not have an impact due to low takeup rates. We also find limited evidence that certain interventions were more effective for individuals with higher credit risk.

Scientific evidence has been building up about the potentially negative effects of pesticides on human health. Fruit and vegetables have a higher percentage of samples with pesticide residues exceeding tolerance levels than any other food item. However, no regulations exist that require point-of-purchase labeling to inform consumers of the use of pesticides during cultivation. Based on a nationally representative sample of the French population, this study examined the impact of labeling designed to provide information about pesticide use during fruit and vegetable cultivation at the point of purchase. The results suggest that information on pesticides has a strong impact on consumers' purchase intention and product choice, and that a large majority of participants support the proposal to display mandatory information about pesticide use through labeling at the point of purchase. We conclude with a discussion of the public policy implications of our findings.

We examine a bottom-up approach to consumer and marketing education for subsistence consumers, that is, those with low income and relatively lower literacy levels. They face a variety of cognitive and other constraints, with difficulty in abstract thinking being a central issue that is critical for effective decision-making. We study the impact of marketplace literacy education, with its unique bottom-up approach, on abstract thinking in the consumer domain. We test the effectiveness of a bottom-up educational approach, which covers concrete examples before abstract concepts, compared to the reverse sequence of a top-down approach. We find that the bottom-up approach in marketplace literacy education leads to more abstract thinking in the consumer domain compared to a top-down approach. We discuss the implications of this research for consumer affairs.

In a consumer society, collective consumption is key to maintaining sociality. However, violence among consumers not only thwarts the benefits of participating in consumer collectives, but also reduces sociality and causes various types of harm. In this study, we investigate the League of Legends gaming community to examine interconsumer violence targeting female gamers and how the mistreatment they experience alters the benefits they derive from being part of the collective. Our exploratory study, based on consumer interviews and auto-ethnographic findings, contributes to the literature on consumer collectives, consumer culture, and gender marketing. Specifically, our data highlight three categories of benefits altered by interconsumer violence—utilitarian, social, and symbolic—each composed of related subcategories. We explain how these benefits are altered by interconsumer violence. We also offer practical recommendations for consumers, community managers, and policymakers to address this phenomenon.

This paper is concerned with the relationship between financial socialization and financial understanding among young children. Measures of financial understanding, appropriate for 4–6 year olds, are developed. Regression analysis is used to relate these measures statistically to a set of financial socialization variables and control variables related to the child, their parents, and their household. Data collected in the nationally representative child and parent 2016 UK Children and Young People's Financial Capability Survey are used. A key empirical finding is that financial understanding is about 10% higher for children whose parents regularly discuss with their children how they spend their money. The analysis suggests that around 20% of parents do not discuss financial matters with their children. It is likely that variation in early-life financial socialization is important in explaining variation in later-life financial understanding. Further research is needed to establish if this relationship is causal.