In many developing countries, buyer-seller exchange among the poor occurs mainly in unique, socially embedded environments that are essentially informal markets. This article describes the findings of an in-depth, in situ study of an informal-economy subsistence marketplace in South India. Through interviews with consumers and owners of survivalist microenterprises, the authors identify seven themes that characterize the subsistence marketplace context, buyer-seller interactions within them, and specific elements of exchange. Drawing on these findings, along with theories of social capital and consumption in poverty, they make the case that business policy in developing countries should aim to empower subsistence entrepreneurs and consumers, embrace emergent solutions, help build bridges between informal and formal economies, and adopt a bottom-up orientation to policy development. The study's findings offer important insights into policy that can help microenterprises of the informal economy become engines of economic growth in these countries.

Political ideology plays a pivotal role in shaping individuals’ attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. However, apart from a handful of studies, little is known about how consumers’ political ideology affects their marketplace behavior. The authors used three large consumer complaint databases from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Federal Communications Commission in conjunction with a county-level indicator of political ideology (the 2012 US presidential election results) to demonstrate that conservative consumers are not only less likely than liberal consumers to report complaints but also less likely to dispute complaint resolutions. A survey also sheds light on the relationship between political ideology and complaint/dispute behavior. Due to stronger motivations to engage in “system justification,” conservative (as opposed to liberal) consumers are less likely to complain or dispute. The present research offers a useful means of identifying those consumers most and least likely to complain and dispute, given that political ideology is more observable than most psychological factors and more stable than most situational factors. Furthermore, this research and its theoretical framework open opportunities for future research examining the influence of political ideology on other marketplace behaviors.

More than a billion entrepreneurs worldwide live in subsistence contexts and run microenterprises to meet life's basic consumption needs. In this article, the authors investigate how two types of consumption constraints in poverty, chronic and periodic constraints, combine to influence entrepreneurial intention. Chronic and periodic constraints are concomitant in subsistence marketplaces and represent consumption-side constraints. A field experiment shows that chronic constraints amplify entrepreneurial intention, but this effect is contingent on the level of periodic constraints. When experiencing low periodic constraints, people with high chronic constraints have greater entrepreneurial intentions than do those with low chronic constraints. When experiencing more periodic constraints, however, the authors do not find this difference. Another field experiment shows the effectiveness of marketplace literacy education in alleviating the adverse impact of periodic constraints through enhancing entrepreneurial self-efficacy. The authors present specific policy recommendations for government, social enterprise, and business relating to enhancing entrepreneurship among the poor in the face of such constraints.

The objective of this article is to develop micro-level behavioral insights at the intersection of poverty and the environment and derive macro-marketing implications. This micro-level behavioral perspective encompasses psychological and socio-cultural phenomena and emphasizes consumption and conservation. Construing the environment in a broad sense to encompass living circumstances, we conducted interviews to uncover the distinctive nature of environmental issues in subsistence marketplaces. Our findings emphasize the importance of different levels of spatial and psychological distance as well as a number of coping strategies that reflect individuals and communities sustaining themselves through survival, relatedness, and growth. We link distances and coping to efficacy and motivation to act, and derive implications for macro-level issues in marketing management, and public policy.

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