Over 4 billion people live in what is commonly referred to as the "bottom of the pyramid" or as subsistence marketplaces. These individuals and families live in substandard housing, with limited or no access to sanitation, potable water, and health care, have low levels of literacy, and earn...

This article provides the background and the events leading up to this special issue, and the composition of articles that follow. This special issue includes articles that take a bottom-up approach in understanding and explaining subsistence marketplaces, focusing on individual, communal, and...

Based on the careful observation and interviews of employees at three companies, and supplemented by cases from the popular business press, a discovery approach is used to derive four management principles that engender creativity and innovation in organizations: (1) manage organizations so that...

This study investigates the influence of vision and touch inputs and gender on the creativity of consumer-derived product concepts. Manipulating vision and touch richness affects how much information is apprehended from product components. Tests include solid three-dimensional components (rich...

Consumer research holds potential for expanding society's understanding of how people experience poverty and mechanisms for poverty alleviation. Capitalizing on this potential, however, will require more exploration of how consumption experiences shape individual and collective well-being among...

This research improves the field's understanding of subsistence consumers by investigating how low socioeconomic class relates to expectations of complexity from new products. The study tests a model of the relationship between consumer socioeconomic class, self-esteem, self-assessed...

This study investigates how people's satisfaction judgments are modified after they interact with other group members. It integrates research on customer satisfaction and social influence to develop hypotheses about how an individual's satisfaction is influenced by discrepancies between her...

This article describes exploratory research on how consumers and small entrepreneurs navigate subsistence marketplaces, with particular emphasis on social networks, a central characteristic of these contexts. Existing studies have characterized subsistence contexts as 1-to-1 interactional...