A Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) plan is an innovative, complex and increasingly popular form of car finance. Consumers pay a deposit and monthly payments, but instead of paying off the total value of the car, they pay off the depreciation over a specified term. We used an experiment to...

Failure to switch service provider is viewed as leaving money on the table. While psychological hassle and switching costs are often invoked to explain the observed inertia, there is little empirical research that directly measures barriers to switching in retail finance markets. This study uses...

This paper argues that telecommunications markets present the consumer with a decision-making environment that is particularly likely to be prone to established biases in consumer decision-making. The analysis identifies four properties of telecommunications markets, which in combination are...

This paper challenges the increasingly common view that the findings of behavioural economics constitute a fourth type of market failure. The market failure framework elevates the standard competitive market model to the status of an ideal. It provides us with tools to identify departures from...

The "obesogenic environment" contributes to the global obesity epidemic. However, many believe that obesity is caused solely by individual choice. This paper investigates how the public in Ireland, the UK, and USA perceive the causes, consequences and severity of obesity compared to an expert...

Following the Euro changeover in January 2002, consumers across the Euro Area perceived a sharp rise in inflation, in contrast to official figures. Several theories have been advanced to explain this apparent economic illusion, but they struggle to account for its striking scale and persistence....

We critically examine and empirically test the hypothesis that the strong socioeconomic gradients characterising attendance at arts events result from similar gradients in preferences for the arts, in line with existing theories of demand for the arts derived from orthodox consumer theory. To...