Pay-What-You-Want – Praxisrelevanz und Konsumentenverhalten

Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) is a participative pricing mechanism which is characterized by the fact that consumers have maximum control over the price they pay. We discuss the business relevance of PWYW and extend the findings of Kim et al. (2009) using latent class regression. Two different classes can be identified and transaction prices are explained by psycho- and socio-demographics. The estimation of the parameters shows that the internal reference price is a good predictor for the prices in class 1, whereas in the 2nd class the level of fairness and satisfaction with the product positively affect the final transaction prices.     

Enduring Legacy? Charles Tilly and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Durable Inequality</Emphasis>

This article assesses Charles Tilly’s Durable Inequality and traces its influence. In writing Durable Inequality, Tilly sought to shift the research agenda of stratification scholars. But the book’s initial impact was disappointing. In recent years, however, its influence has grown, suggesting a more enduring legacy.     

Material hardship and self-rated health among low-income households in South Korea

Concerns over poverty and health inequality are growing in South Korea. Using advanced statistical methods including lagged-dependent variable and fixed-effects approaches, we investigated whether experiencing material hardship (MH) was associated with self-rated health (SRH) among low-income households in South Korea. This study found that the experience of MH was positively associated with higher likelihood of reporting poor SRH (OR = 1.42, p < .05) and that experiencing two or more items of MH presented more harmful influence on SRH (OR = 2.02, p < .001). This study also found that the negative association between MH and SRH was stronger among the unemployed households.     

A Race, Class, and Gender Analysis of Thriving

Thriving research has been dominated by a psychological perspective. Individuals are typically the unit of analysis and thriving is generally operationalized using psychological measures. This article discusses a race, class, and gender perspective that derives from feminist sociology, as well as its implications for thriving research. This perspective, which focuses on the role of race, class, and gender inequality in organizing social relations, draws attention to the need to recognize that both the likelihood that someone will face a challenge and their ability to thrive in the face of that challenge are determined largely by their location in the social hierarchy. It also demonstrates that distinctions must be made between thriving in the face of the routine challenges of daily life and thriving in the face of challenges that are an extraordinary part of life. Finally, the race, class, and gender perspective has implications for the development of interventions to promote thriving. Each of these issues is elaborated further with illustrations drawn from life history and focus group interviews with and field work conducted among drug-addicted women.     

On the dynamics of populations with two age groups

By restricting the number of age groups to two and by introducing continued fractions, the dynamics of populations with deterministically changing vital rates are completely specified at all times. Explicit expressions for the sequence of the product of population projection matrices are given. From these, relative age distribution and reproductive values to any desired accuracy are obtained as functions of the vital rates. Thus, the results given in this paper are stronger than any existing weak ergodic theorems.     

Advertising, Individual Consumption Levels, and the Natural Environment, 1900–2000

One central determinant of global environmental change is the continued expansion of personal consumption levels. In order to more fully understand the relationship between consumption and environmental degradation, the determinants of consumption must first be identified. Prior research in this area has focused on economic factors, primarily personal disposable income and population demographic characteristics. The role of cultural factors, including advertising, has been actively mentioned in theoretical analyses of the driving forces of individual consumption. However, this has not been empirically tested. In this article, we conduct an analysis of the impact of advertising on consumption levels in the United States. We start with a theoretical discussion of the literature on advertising and consumption. Based on this literature, we establish three hypotheses regarding the relationship between advertising expenditure and personal consumption. These hypotheses are then tested using time series analysis over the time period 1900–2000. The results show that advertising significantly impacts overall consumption and that these effects vary by type of consumption. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this analysis for further research into the driving forces of global environmental change.