IMPACT OF FACTORS INFLUENCING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR IN WEST BENGAL

In the last years, consumer behaviour and their decision-making process has advanced and has become an important topic in the marketing society. this paper presents an extensive review on the influencing factors on consumers behavior and their buying decision-making process in marketing. The marketing starts and finish with the consumer hence, consumer purchasing decision taking shows how well the organizations marketing strategy suits marketing demand. Consumer behavior includes the psychological procedures which consumers experience in understanding their requirements. Discovering patterns to rectify these requirements, taking buying decisions for example, whether to purchase goods and services and if so, which types of brands and where, interpret tips, making plans, and executing these plans for example, with engaging in comparison shopping or real buying of products, Totally, modern and professional marketing staffs try to know consumers and their responses, therefore, analyses the essential traits of their behavior.

The Effect of Online Q&As and Product Reviews on Product Performance Metrics: Amazon.com as a Case Study

Online reviews have received an overwhelming interest in the recent decades. Comparatively speaking, the online product questions and answers (Q&As) have received less attention than online reviews, despite that they both affect the image and the value of a project. Although online reviews and Q&As are both forms of user generated knowledge ion online communities, they may affect customers decision making differently. Furthermore, Q&As are very useful for pre-purchase information-searching and comparison shopping, especially when online product reviews either do not provide the needed answer or getting the desired information requires additional “cost” (i.e. time and effort) to sort out. Our findings show that Q&A traits had a varying effect on the product performance. We also found that review helpfulness is another important factor that affects product sale and popularity on e-commerce sites. The present study adds to existing electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and product review literature.

Spatial clustering: Influence of urban street networks on retail sales volumes

As is often believed that the more centrally located a shop, the higher its sales volume, this paper analyzed relationships between the spatial clustering of retail stores, their respective transaction volumes, and the urban street networks to determine whether, and to what extent, the accessibility and density of a store’s location was correlated with its transaction volume. While this hypothesis is widely accepted, its veracity is underexplored and rarely validated using large-scale empirical datasets, possibly owing to the lack of access. Therefore, transaction datasets and accessibility indicators were first examined; a clear, positive correlation between density and revenue was found for specialty stores wherein people do “comparison shopping,” and for stores that complemented each other for activities such as “one-trip shopping,” the revenues were positively correlated when the stores were clustered. Generally, daily-use stores’ revenues were more sensitive to local access and those of non-daily-use stores were more sensitive to global access. In conclusion, these findings would not have been found using conventional methodology focused on the retail sector as a whole, because aggregate market mechanisms would have hidden the observed effects on specific store categories. Therefore, upon disaggregating the data, we found a distinct heterogeneity across the different store types for what concerns the relationship between revenue and location.

No Alarms and Many Surprises: Salience as a Basis For Excessive Pricing Intervention in an Antitrust Context

This article explores how consumers’ bounded rationality can justify antitrust intervention when a firm becomes a monopoly and exploits a product attribute that was not policed by market forces when there was competition for the market. Behavioral economics predicts product complexity leads consumer demand to be a function of salient costs and benefits rather than of actual costs and benefits of products. The divergence between the former and the latter hinders and distorts competition. In fact, comparison shopping is costlier, and sellers can backload part of their prices to nonsalient product attributes. Consumers perceive only a distorted lower price by focusing on salient product features, which leaves room for inefficient matching and opportunistic behavior given the risk of ex post exploitation. These are behavioral limits of competition. In this work, I argue that when (i) there is a lock-in problem, (ii) consumers do not control the probability of triggering a hidden price, and (iii) a typical consumer could not have reasonably expected to find such a hidden price, antitrust intervention would not only deter ex post exploitation but would also enhance competition on the real price of goods. Antitrust would correct a behavioral market failure.

The European Commission’s Google Shopping decision: Could bias have anything to do with it?

Google has been on the radar of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition for some time. Over the last few years, the European Commission has launched competition law investigations into three Google services: Google Shopping, Android and AdSense. In June 2017, the Commission released its decision in the Google Shopping case. The Commission imposed a record fine of €2.42 billion on Google for violating EU antitrust rules. According to the Commission, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an ‘illegal advantage’ to its own advertisers through its comparison shopping service. The Google Shopping decision can be understood to a significant degree by reference to conscious and unconscious biases. These biases, of course, are not overt – in administrative decision-making, decision-makers have to apply the law and support their decisions with reasons. Legal reasoning, however, provides an opportunity to test the plausibility of hypothesized bias: if the reasoning is strong, persuasive and objective, bias is either irrelevant (that is, it has not influenced the decision) or unlikely. If reasoning is weak, unpersuasive, or subjective, bias may have played a role. As this article demonstrates, based on careful analysis of the Commission’s reasoning in the Google Shopping case, the hypothesis of possible bias is confirmed.