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The article presents abstracts of various papers related to polls and the new politics. One of the paper discussed is "The Political Functions of Public Opinion Polls in the United States," by Irving Crespi. The dilemma of democratic societies that so concerned Tocqueville, how to free men from entrenched authority without subjecting them to a more arbitrary public opinion, is particularly relevant to the analysis of tile role of public opinion polls in the United States today. Another paper discussed is "The Changing Role of the American Political Parties," by Harry S. Aslimore. The upcoming election may be the one that will finally demonstrate the significance of the shifts in United States population, and most importantly the changes in communications that have affected the political process in this country. Some other papers discussed are "Polling: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Bandwagon Effect," by John L. Perry, "New Techniques for Measuring, Analyzing and Reporting Social Change," by Samuell Lubell and "Application of Q to the Assessment of Public Opinion," by William Stephenson.

This article presents abstracts of several studies related to sociology. Irving Crespi presented an analysis concerning the relations between anomie, alienation, and privatization. Joel Fuerst discussed the business of satisfying the unsatisfied demands of Europe. Daniel Lerner examined a shift from the earlier revolution of rising expectations, via a long sequence of unachieved ambitions and disappointed hopes, in the direction of what may be becoming a revolution of rising frustrations. Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal summarized several studies dealing with normal and abnormal adjustment in the aging process, based on panel studies of 1,200 mentally well and mentally impaired persons sixty years and older interviewed at three points in time. John T. Lanzetta reported data from a number of studies that explore direct and indirect procedures for measuring subjective uncertainty. Clark Leavitt presented the relation between a measure of information transmission called meaningfulness and day-after recall scores from field tests. Wallace H. Wallace presented methods to evaluate consumer behavior in the laboratory. Stanley Peterfreund examined a study in 1961 about the barriers to achieving a superior level of customer service.

This paper reviews several concepts gleaned from research on learning as studied both by psychologists and consumer researchers. Several applications of learning theory, attitude change, and image formation are then applied to the field of advertising, not from the usual view of the advertiser but rather from the view of corrective advertising. Further it presents an overview of studies in corrective and counter advertising and attempts to assess the state of the art. Portions of this paper were presented before the Subcommittee on Monopoly, Committee on Small Business, United States Senate, June 6, 1973. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three different aspects of effectiveness of advertising communication. First, how does a specific advertising communication get distorted in the consumer's mind, what are the dimensions of distortion and what factors produce the cognitive distortion. Second, how does advertising influence the consumer choice process? Two mechanisms called persuasion and reinforcement are discussed and the underlying processes of influence and tactics are explored. Third, how does advertising influence consumption behavior? Two mechanisms called reminder precipitation are discussed and the underlying processes and tactics are explored. Finally, the paper discusses a sequential linkage among the four mechanisms of advertising effectiveness and gives opinions on the pervasiveness of advertising through each mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about marketing education at the college and university level is presented. According to the author, students should know the function of marketing in the U.S. economic structure. Other noted aspects that should be covered are, the channels of distribution, consumer behavior and issues surrounding competition.

This paper continues the discussion of the accuracy of recording of the National Consumer Panel which was begun in the previous issue. Results are given of experiments which measured changes in accuracy of recording resulting from controlled changes in total work load, compensation, and training. In addition, a comparison is made between brand share data obtained from a panel and from a recall survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impulse purchasing is an important aspect of customer in-store behavior as discussed in the previous article. The authors of this paper indicate that the concept, as presently employed, has limited usefulness as a basis for marketing decisions. They outline the problems marketers must confront in order to make the unplanned purchasing concept operational for marketing decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts of research and articles on price and allocation theory, income and employment theory and history of economic thought. S. Ahmad evaluates the idea that change in the relative price of the factors may lead to an induced bias in invention in the paper, On the Theory of Induced Invention. Ahmad uses the concept of the innovation possibility curve for examining Professor Charles Kennedy's conclusion that the influence of the relative shares of the factors on inventions, tends to bring about a constancy of the relative shares in the long run. Meanwhile, R. Anspach's paper, The General Incompatibility of the Traditional Consumer Equilibrium with Economic Rationality--an Exploratory Analysis, demonstrates through classical utility analysis that once this assumption is discarded the traditional consumer equilibrium is normally incompatible with rational behavior. In Notes on the Theory of Second Best, author L. Athanasiou suggest that a genuine second constraint may not exist in general; which casts serious doubts on the existence, in general, of second best solutions. Further, implementing a second best may, in the long-run tend to propagate imperfections, leading to a poorer and poorer optimum possible.

The relevance of "brand loyalty" to the formulation of a profitable program of market segmentation has intrigued both practitioners and scholars alike ever since the publication of the pioneering work of economists George Brown and Ross Cunningham in the early 1950's. Various issues that have been explored in the article shows, firstly, how much brand-loyal customers contribute an identifiable market segment; secondly, whether they have different rates of consumption for the product under study; thirdly, difference in their income levels, ethnic background, shopping patterns, etc. The study reported in this paper consists of an analysis of the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and household brand loyalty for forty-four grocery products. The study reported in this paper consists of an analysis of the relationship between the brand loyalty exhibited toward a given product by a household and the household's socioeconomic characteristics, its total consumption of the product, its store-shopping habits, its private-brand proneness, the percentage of the product purchased in small-sized containers, and the average price paid per unit.

The article focuses on the book "Perceived Risk, Information Processing and Consumer Behavior. The major feature of the book, according to the author is that it is an excellent example of how solid intellectual and applied results can be obtained only through a systematic and enduring research program. Researcher Raymond Bauer brought with him the notion that mass media communication is a two-way process, that is, the role of audiences is not only passive but also, and crucially, active. This notion was gradually made more specific. One of the ways in which a consumer is active is his search, evaluation, use, and transmission of information. Consciously or not, information may be needed to find out and assess the performance characteristics of a product, brand, or service and its psychosocial characteristics. These needs for information as well as the cognitive and motivational mechanisms by which this information is processed pervade daily problem solving and decision making and, eventually, contribute to the realization of overt acts of buying.

This article examines the effects of inflation and of transitory changes in income on consumer saving and spending behavior in the United States. To judge from the recent pronouncements of the forecasting fraternity, uncertainty about the behavior of consumers is at the heart of differences in view about macroeconomic policy at the present time. The inability of the economic recovery to gather sufficient force to bite into unemployment rates has been widely attributed to continued hesitancy and caution of consumers as reflected in exceptionally high ratios of personal saving to disposable income. And differences of opinion about the probable vigor or sluggishness of the recovery are due in considerable part to differences in judgments about the probable consumer response to the unfolding economic situation. One of the major sources of uncertainty about consumer reactions concerns the way that price inflation, both expected and realized, influences consumer decisions about spending or saving. This paper attempts to mine survey measures of consumer expectations, attitudes, and plans in an effort to determine their usefulness in predicting and explaining consumer behavior. We ask two questions: First, what is the role of these anticipatory variables in models designed to forecast consumer behavior? Second, what are the economic variables underlying the movement of consumer anticipation?

The article presents some abstracts of published materials concerning population, welfare programs and consumer economics. The abstract entitled "The Determinants of Scholastic Achievement: An Appraisal of Some Recent Evidence," by S. Bowles and H.M. Levin assesses some of the more highly publicized and controversial conclusions of the Coleman Report, published by the U.S. Office of Education in 1966. The paper entitled "Health Planning," by H. Correa attempts to make use of the methodology of economics and operations research for determining the optimum allocation of resources among different methods of preventing OT curing diseases. The paper entitled "Welfare Payments and Work Incentive: Some Determinants of the Rates of General Assistance Payments," by H. Kasper presents an analysis of the determinants of the proportion of people receiving one form of public assistance, General Assistance Payments. The paper entitled "Attrition Among Ph.D. Candidates: An Analysis of a Cohort of Recent Woodrow Wilson Fellows," by J.D. Mooney attempts to isolate systematically the quantitative importance of a number of explanatory variables for the problem of attrition of doctoral candidates.

The article presents several abstracts of research papers about population, welfare programs and consumer economics. The first paper "Explaining and Predicting Aggregative Consumer Attitudes," by F.G. Adams and E.W. Green, examines the relationships between the movement of objective economic variables, those likely to influence consumer welfare and expectations, and consumer attitudes. Contemporaneous explanation as well as prediction of the attitudes was sought in a time series multiple regression format. The second paper "The Determinants of Interstate Population Movements," by C. Blanco, reports the results of an empirical study of interstate population movements in the United States during the period 1950 to 1957. A series of multiple correlation analyses was made with a large number of variables thought to be of possible importance in determining population movements. The third paper "Long-Term Labor Requirements and Output of the Educational System," by W.A. Chance, provides a preliminary model for relating projected labor requirements to the output of the educational system in such a manner as to achieve full employment and optimum output levels simultaneously.

The article presents discussions by economists on various papers published in the May 1, 1970 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." It discusses effects of tax policy measures when consumers behave rationally and markets function, as they should, in a model embodying conditions of a full and general equilibrium. It states that in the analysis of tax policy, the most important effects to consider are long-term effects. They are what the economy has to live with indefinitely. "Announcement effects" are instantaneous and for that reason evanescent, the transition between announcement and the longer-term equilibrium is by definition transitory. The long run is precisely what economist Lauritis R. Christensen focused on in his paper. Christensen noted that saving is likely to be insensitive to the rate of return and produced two cases, one in which the counterpart of the reduction in revenue caused by the tax incentives was added borrowing from the household sector and the other in which the counterpart was reduced government investment, which resulted in opposite directions of movement of private investment.

The article presents authors' comments on two papers on teaching economics at high school level in the U.S. by economists Howard S. Ellis and G.L. Bach. Both professors Ellis and Bach have asked for a separate course to be taught in the high schools by competent teachers who understand the spirit of the discipline as well as its techniques. Both have asked that the theory should be made the center of the course. Those who have examined the high school texts and know how heavily they emphasize consumer finance will see this as a distinct step forward. Both have also noted in their papers that the citizen is not in a position to think about public policy without a basic understanding of economics. Professor Ellis has designed his semester course around the needs of the citizen, and Bach has promised that his task force would present a statement of the minimum level of economics essential to good citizenship and reasonably attainable through the high schools. The article agrees that a theory oriented economics course for the citizen is a good first goal in view of the present state of economic illiteracy in the public school system.

This paper develops a model which is an extension of a class of stochastic response models first proposed by Coleman [5]. In its present form the model applies to the binary response situation. The model postulates a population of respondents who are heterogeneous with respect to their response probabilities. A given respondent may experience changes in his response probability in the intervals between probability, the model is zero order. The paper also presents a variant of the minimum chi square procedure which may be used to estimate and test the model. An application to consumer brand choice data demonstrates that the model is empirically viable. Potential applications to multi-wave voting intentions panels and social-psychological experiments are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper discusses the nature and existence of competitive equilibria in an uncertain world. The author begins by showing that Arrow and Debreu's models of consumer and entrepreneurial choice under uncertainty do not adequately represent the behavior of consumers and firms in such a world. The author starts discussing Arrow and Debreu's models by defining two terms, a state of the world and an event. In this paper the author takes a state of the world to be a complete description of the world as it was in the past, as it is in the present, and as it will be in the future. Next, the author proposes alternative models of consumer and entrepreneurial choice under uncertainty, and he states conditions under which a competitive equilibrium would exist in an economy populated by consumers and producers who behave in accordance with our models. Finally the author discusses the possibility that financial intermediaries and risk poolers might emerge in our economy, and he shows that even in the absence of externalities a competitive economy in an uncertain world need not allocate resources efficiently. In conclusion, the author comments briefly on the efficiency of a competitive allocation of resources in our uncertain world.

Cross-spectral analysis is recognized as a powerful analytical tool for the analysis of time-varying behavior in a number of disciplines. Applications in business have been limited, however, and the potential usefulness of this new approach to time series analysis has received relatively little attention in advertising. The purpose of this paper is to explain cross-spectral analysis and illustrate the use of this new technique in studying the interaction between advertising and sales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until very recently, the major focus of research in the field of consumer behavior has been on the selection of products, brands and decision choices primarily in the sphere of marketing. The purpose of this paper was to modify a model developed to measure market share to account for the variables that enter into the selection of a political candidate and predict voting behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological analysis of consumers' spending and saving behavior in response to inflation, recession, or increased assets and inventories is shown to result in findings that differ from generalizations presented by traditional economic analysis. The paper indicates the usefulness of the methods applied in behavioral studies of economic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper concerned with the validity of advertising effectiveness measurements is presented. The author notes that the measurements in question are not geared toward the visibility of advertisements, but rather their effectiveness in creating in the consumer an association with the product being advertised.

The article presents a response by Joseph M. Kamen and Robert J. Toman to commentaries about their paper "The Psychophysics of Prices." The authors note that Weber's Law states that the increment in stimulus intensity needed to produce a just noticeable difference is directly proportional to the stimulus. They contend that it has nothing to do with prices or price differences since any price difference is discriminable. The authors say it was clearly documented in their original article that extrapolations were made based on this directly proportional relationship.

This paper extends the factor analytic model of brand loyalty to multichotomous data in which a consumer's varying degrees of loyalty to several brands are estimated. The resultant loyalty scores are compared with simple probability measures and also explored in relation to aggregate market shares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple discriminant analyses of consumer owners of thrift deposits in commercial banks and savings and loan associations show that measures obtained by a standard pencil-and-paper psychological test prove to be more effective than standard socioeconomic variables and asset balances in discriminating among consumer groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a series of experiments in which subjects were exposed to series of competing messages and were asked to make choices based on the messages they had received. Choice-making proved to be extremely sensitive to certain properties of the pre-choice message streams. When some messages were delivered more often than others, choices were almost exactly proportional to each message's share of the message stream, up to a point of diminishing returns. In addition, messages proved most effective when delivered near the choice-point and when they were delivered in "flights" or "bursts." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model for the evaluation of individuals used as sources for subjective information. The evaluation is based upon the amount and nature of the individual's relevant experience and the consistency and completeness of the information he provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between the psychological characteristics of a consumer and his purchase behavior? In this paper the authors briefly review pertinent research and lay theoretical foundations for a model of consumer behavior based upon an individual's self-concept and the symbolic value of the goods he buys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a response to a critique by Schuchman and Perry of a study on the relationship of persuasibility and self-confidence from the May 1969 issue of "Journal of Marketing Research." The authors argued in the original paper that people with lower self-confidence were easier to persuade. The original authors, in an experiment with nylon hosiery, believed that the results showed that women with low specific self-confidence were more likely to change their perception after seeing a tape with an alleged sales person. This information appeared to be curvilinear, not linear as previously thought. Schuchman and Perry believe that this particular experiment was a fluke, but one of the original authors believes the data from the original experiment is strong enough to be published.

The authors report a study of reactions to four department store ads, two with color and two black and white. The ads with color evoked more positive reactions to the merchandise and were more often identified with higher status storm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on industrial marketing. They include "Rubber Products Industry" and "A Study of Hospital Purchasing," by William S. Peters and "Consumer Affairs: The Case For Joint Enterprise," by F. A. Babione.

Several versions of a mathematical programming model which determines attribute weights for each consumer are empirically evaluated using data on dry cereals and automobiles. The model is found to be a good predictor of consumer preferences, particularly for dry cereals. Managerial implications for product repositioning, new product design, and market segmentation are discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the results of a study in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, that appraises the contribution of the Survey Research Center's Index of Consumer Sentiment to forecasts of automobile demand, by Saul Hymans. Hymans searches for economic variables that may be substituted in regression equations for the index of consumer sentiment. He finds that a combination of three variables--earlier changes in real disposable income, in common stock prices and in consumer prices--taken together with the lagged index, explain nearly 80 percent of the variation in the index over the period 1956 to 1968. Personal experiences and information received on economic matters influence changes in willingness to but. If it is true that changes in consumer sentiment often originate in different considerations in consecutive periods, then a satisfactory fit resulting from the use of specific variables in a past period cannot be expected to insure success with the same variables in the future. Hymans speaks of the stock market as a possible source of changes in consumer sentiment. However, studies on the reasons why the index has changed, carried out primarily in 1962 and in 1969-1970, do not support Hymans' opinion. Even at times of major stock movements, relatively few people--and even relatively few stockholders--explained their opinion about economic trends by stock market movements and the majority said that events in the market were unrelated to the course of the economy.

The present paper provides a proof of the existence of a utility function and the converse of that theorem using decision theory. In particular the development uses probability mass functions. The authors believe that this approach provides a useful alternative to existing proofs and, in addition, ties the analysis to well-understood concepts in probability theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deal with the effect of the individual firm's selling-market experience on its investment activities. The forces which tend to make the selling-market experience of businessmen in general stimulating or discouraging to investment is also being discussed in this paper. This involves incidentally an analysis of the effects of consumers' decisions to spend rather than to save, or to hoard rather than to invest on the terms offered by firms seeking capital. The article also covers the combinations in which the governing forces are likely to act, and will draw some implications for economic policy. For most analytical purposes, economists find it handy to say that what a firm does, is determined by its pursuit of profit in a setting of economic data. Surprises on the selling market, besides affecting the entrepreneur's expectations as to the future course of events, are likely also to make him have more or less confidence in his estimates. If current experience is very different from what was expected, the accuracy of further forecasts is thrown into doubt.

Consider a single-server queuing process with Poisson input and general service time distribution. Define the remaining busy period x(t) as the time from a given instant t until the server becomes idle for the first time. Let ξ(t) be the number of customers in the system at time t. Let x1(t) be the remaining service time for the customer being served at time t. In this paper we shall study the stochastic law of the remaining service time x1O) given that ξ(0)=i and ξ(t)-r. The result will then be applied to the problem of finding the joint distribution of the remaining busy period x (t) and the number of customers served during x (t) given that ξ(0) = i and ξ(t)=r. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Markov processes appear to provide a fruitful conceptual basis for study of customer populations in the face of marketing activity The purpose of this paper is to summarize characteristics and some implications and applications of the Markov model Characteristic behavior of the model is compared with published data, and areas for further analytical and experimental effort are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new, more general model of consumer brand choice behavior. The model is a composite of the Bernoulli, Markov, and Linear Learning Models, all of which have previously been proposed to represent brand choice behavior. The properties of the model are explored, and a parameter estimation technique is developed. A special case of the model is developed for situations in which insufficient data are available to estimate the parameters of the complete model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a report of a study of innovation of consumer nondurable products. A simple hypothesis about consumer behavior in short run, nonequilibrium situations is presented. Following classical economic methodology, the behavior of individuals is then aggregated. This aggregate equation form is tested and shown to be not rejected by the data. The effect of marketing actions of the firm upon consumer behavior is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information related to socio-economic correlates of Consumer behavior. Market Research Analysts have studied consumer buying motives and habits with respect to innumerable product lines. Very few researchers have made use of social organization variables as correlates of specific buying motives and habits. The purpose of the present paper is to examine social organization determinants of consumer-buying motives in food purchasing. Following the procedure of other market researchers, an attempt was made to ascertain consumers' patronage motives in buying groceries. The results given in the table indicates that consumers patronize particular stores for specific reasons. In order to compare buying motives with buying habits, categories of a more genotypic nature were sought. The dichotomy of emotional and rational, suggested by some marketing economists, was deemed unsatisfactory for the present data. An examination of the patronage motives given by respondents have suggested that many were indicative of forms of product differentiation as defined.

This article presents a response to an article that examined the conflict between advertisers and consumers. The author claims that the article argues that the manner in which marketing and advertising courses are being taught is detrimental to consumers. The author sets forth his own argument that states that in order to effectively market products advertising employees must have the necessary communication skills and consumer knowledge to make products appeal to consumers' wants and needs. If this theory is correct he believes that there is no conflict between consumers and advertisers.