Representing Social Construction in Consumer Activities: Single-Period and Multi-Period Activity Production

Consumers are seen as limited decision makers who set short-term activity levels from their budgets, stocks of experience, and values following a preference-maximizing heuristic. Disturbances to activity levels in their evolution by exogeneties of social and economic environments, and the feedback of activity levels which agents have no systematic ability to anticipate, reset stock and value levels through the interactive relationships among endogenous variables. Agents then solve the maximization problem for a subsequent period using stock and value levels as modified by the evolutionary process. The dependence of a single-period decision on the stock and value constructs is examined and forms for the dynamic evolution of stock and value constructs that represent the feedback of activity levels to stock and value levels are also introduced. Implications of these forms for the social construction of activities are discussed.