Price Intransparency, Consumer Decision Making and European Consumer Law

Boom, W.H. van

doi:10.1007/s10603-011-9163-8

Cited by 27 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Gourville posits that by reframing an aggregate expense into a series of smaller, daily expenses, prices seem to be lower and thus more attractive to consumers. Traditional economic theory, however, would predict that the way in which prices are presented to consumers should not have an impact on the demand of the product; a phenomenon known in the literature as the idea of description invariance (Tversky and Kahnemann 1986;Van Boom 2011). Furthermore, Gourville (1998) describes the application of a reversed penniesa-day strategy for preventing consumers from buying undesirable products.…”

Section: Conclusion and Development Of Hypotheses 2 Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disclosure of Energy Operating Cost Information: A Silver Bullet for Overcoming the Energy-Efficiency Gap?

Heinzle¹

2012

J Consum Policy

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Consumers frequently act contrary to rational economic theory by overvaluing an initially higher purchase price while heavily discounting future energy operating costs. One opportunity to help limit the scale of over-discounting is to fully disclose the energy consumption of a product, e.g., by means of an energy label. However, not only the availability of information, but also the way in which specific information about the energy consumption is framed, is likely to affect how individuals discount future operating costs. A cost accuracy estimation experiment reveals that disclosing annual energy operating costs for the product category of televisions might risk assisting consumers in realising that the possible energy operating cost savings fall below initial estimates. A subsequent choicebased conjoint experiment shows that disclosing annual energy operating costs thus affects consumers by causing them to discount future energy operating costs of a television more heavily than when the information is disclosed in the form of "watts." Owing to the power of the reversed "pennies-a-day" effect, disclosing lifetime energy operating cost information, however, proves to be most effective in guiding consumers towards more energy-efficient shopping behaviour. Implications for consumer policy and suggestions for future research are discussed.Keywords Energy operating cost disclosure . Energy labels . Discount rate . Energy efficiency gap . Choice-based conjoint analysis Residential appliances and electronic equipment are responsible for approximately 30% of the total consumption of electricity in countries belonging to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, and the demand for electricity to power those appliances is expected to grow significantly within the next few years (Bertoldi and Atanasiu 2009;Crosbie 2008;EEA 2010;IEA 2009). At the same time, there is great potential for significant energy savings in the residential sector by simply switching to the most efficient J Consum Policy (2012) 35:43-64

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Section: Conclusion and Development Of Hypotheses 2 Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disclosure of Energy Operating Cost Information: A Silver Bullet for Overcoming the Energy-Efficiency Gap?

Heinzle¹

2012

J Consum Policy

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“…Recurrent critiques to the information paradigm include the fact that, as a result of EU legislation, consumers are overloaded with information (Kästle-Lamparter, 2018 ; Straetmans, 2019 , pp. 4–5; van Boom, 2011 , p. 360; p. 395). Consumers’ lack of interest in reading terms and conditions has been well reported in the literature (Elshout et al, 2016 ).…”

Section: Online Review Mechanisms and Consumer Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Unreliability of Online Review Mechanisms

Narciso

2022

J Consum Policy

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Online reviews have an undeniable impact on the market and are an important source of consumer information. From a legal perspective, online reviews actively influence consumers’ decisions to enter into a contract. Moreover, online reviews convey pre-contractual information that consumers find relevant and easy to understand, unlike the pre-contractual information disclosed as a result of EU law–based information duties. From this perspective, online reviews could potentially be seen as a complement of the flawed EU law–based information paradigm and regulatory improvement options based on reviews could be explored. However, the unreliability of online reviews is an obstacle that haunts consumers, practitioners, regulators, and academics alike. This unreliability has previously been identified as a reason not to award online reviews a more significant role in the EU law–based regulatory framework of pre-contractual information in consumer contracts. This paper explores the merits of this argument by discussing how the unreliability of online reviews is currently regulated. This paper takes a broad perspective on regulation, focusing not only on EU consumer legislation, but also looking at standardization, soft law, self-regulation, and the role of national consumer authorities. Overall, this paper argues that there are sufficient measures in place to shift the debate from the unreliability of reviews to reviews’ potential role in the protection of consumer informational interests.

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“…The number of different interventions to be included for testing should be minimised as each intervention exponentially increases the number of conditions to be included (Van Bavel, Rodríguez-Priego and Maghiros, 2015 [168]). For example, if testing consumer comprehension of a label, label colour, text size and logo placement might be relevant factors.…”

Section: Developing Options For Improving Disclosuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving online disclosures with behavioural insights

2018

OECD Digital Economy Papers

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Price Intransparency, Consumer Decision Making and European Consumer Law

Abstract: Consumer Decision Making, Framing and Anchoring, Bounded Calculation Abilities, Bundling, Lock-in,

Cited by 27 publications

References 47 publications

Disclosure of Energy Operating Cost Information: A Silver Bullet for Overcoming the Energy-Efficiency Gap?

Disclosure of Energy Operating Cost Information: A Silver Bullet for Overcoming the Energy-Efficiency Gap?

The Unreliability of Online Review Mechanisms

Improving online disclosures with behavioural insights

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