The Routledge Companion to Consumer Behavior Analysis provides a unique and eclectic combination of behavioral, cognitive and environmental perspectives to illuminate the real-world complexities of consumer choice in a marketing-oriented economy. Edited by a leading authority in the field, the contributing authors have created a unique anthology for understanding consumer preference by bringing together the very latest research and thinking in consumer behavior analysis. This comprehensive and innovative volume ranges over a broad multi-disciplinary perspective from economic psychology, behavioral psychology and experimental economics, but its chief focus is on the critical evaluation of consumer choice in the natural settings of affluent, marketing-oriented economies. By focussing on human economic and social choices, which involve social exchange, it explores and reveals the enormous potential of consumer behavior analysis to illuminate the role of modern marketing-oriented business organizations in shaping and responding to consumer choice. This will be of particular interest to academics, researchers and advanced students in marketing, consumer behavior, behavior analysis, social psychology, behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.

The two experiments reported in this book are designed to help understand and assess the competing methodologies of econometrics and the tacit knowledge content of the discipline. The book contains a number of applied econometrics papers, all written by professional econometricians, each of which uses the same data set and tries to answer the same questions, but each uses different techniques and provides different answers. In addition, the book contains analyses and comparative assessments of these papers. The data are described in detail, and are freely available on the Internet.

We examine the effects of cold weather periods on family budgets and on nutritional outcomes in poor American families. Expenditures on food and home fuels are tracked by linking the Consumer Expenditure Survey to temperature data. Using the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we track calorie consumption, dietary quality, vitamin deficiencies, and anemia in summer and winter months. We find that both rich and poor families increase fuel expenditures in response to unusually cold weather (a 10 degree F drop below normal). At same time, poor families reduce food expenditures by roughly the same amount as the increase in fuel expenditures, while rich families increase food expenditures. Poor adults and children reduce caloric intake by roughly 200 calories during winter months, unlike richer adults and children. In sensitivity analyses, we find that decreases in food expenditure are most pronounced outside the South. We conclude that poor parents and their children outside the South spend and eat less food during cold weather temperature shocks. We surmise that existing social programs fail to buffer against these shocks.