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The investment behaviour of individuals has been a major area of interest for several researchers and policymakers due to its great impact on the economy. This study aimed to assess the investment behaviour of individuals in light of their risk appetite and how financial literacy regulates this relationship.

A self-administered structured questionnaire was used to collect responses from individuals using purposive and convenience sampling techniques. Individuals were presented with 16 investment avenues widely offered by the Indian financial market to choose from to construct a hypothetical portfolio. The association between risk appetite, financial literacy and the composition of the hypothetical portfolio was analysed using a gologit model.

Increased risk appetite increased the probability of respondents creating a portfolio with a greater proportion of risky assets and less diversification. Lower levels of financial literacy pointed towards portfolios with traditional and low-risk avenues. The results also revealed a significant moderating impact of financial literacy on risk appetite and the creation of the type of a hypothetical portfolio.

Even though the intended behaviour is a close estimate of actual behaviour, there is a possibility of deviation that cannot be ignored.

The present study provides insights into how individuals make portfolio choices by incorporating risk appetite and diversification factors whilst making investment decisions, thereby expanding the literature from an emerging economy perspective. The role of financial literacy as a moderator has not been studied in the domain of hypothetical portfolio creation in India, which has been empirically explored in the current study.

In recent years, the food industry has developed and brought to the market a number of “functional food” with healthy characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to study and compare the effects of knowledge and food technology neophobia on individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for functionalized healthy food.

In order to explore these effects in hypothetical vs real settings, an experiment defined by a within-subject design with two treatments (functionalized vs conventional food) on two auction payment conditions (hypothetical vs real) has been conducted. The products chosen for the experiment were two different types of crushed tomatoes: conventional crushed tomatoes (control product) and a crushed tomatoes enriched with lycopene (functionalized product).

Results showed that participants stated, on average, a higher WTP for tomatoes enriched with lycopene than for conventional. This positive premium price was not affected by socio-demographic variables, political orientation and tomato-related preferences. As expected, the level of knowledge about lycopene exerted a significant positive effect on premium price in both auctions condition. Also the Healthy choice subscale of the Food Technology Neophobia Scale (FTNS) was a significant predictor of premium price, but only when the auction was hypothetical.

This paper might shed some light upon the predictive power of the FTNS on individuals’ behavior in a real market setting.

We adopt a standard distributional impact methodology, based on Atkinson's cost of inequality approach, to estimate the degree of implicit redistribution created through public funding of health insurance in Canada. The first stage of the exercise is to determine the public health insurance benefits received by families of various age and composition and to add these to measured after-tax incomes. In our base case, which uses the Atkinson Mean Logarithmic Deviation as inequality index, we find that accounting for public health insurance benefits implies a reduction in inequality equivalent to 2.4% of per capita income. We then model the implications of moving to a hypothetical fully privatized system while proportionately refunding to individuals the tax revenues saved in doing so. This would give rise to a further 2.4% equivalent per capita income reduction resulting from increased inequality in the distribution of after-tax income. Thus, for this scenario, moving from public financing of health insurance in Canada to a fully privatized system implies an overall increase in inequality equivalent to a loss of 4.8% of per capita income. This corresponds to an increase of about 25% in existing inequality. Not surprisingly, the impact of publicly financed health insurance in reducing inequality is strongest for the elderly.

Many world regions are developing quickly and experiencing increasing levels of sanitation, causing an epidemiological shift of hepatitis A in these areas. The shift occurs when children avoid being infected with the disease until a later age due to cleaner water sources, food, and hygiene practices in their environment; but if they are infected at later age, the disease is much more severe and lost productivity costs are higher. The purpose of this paper is to examine what could occur if an epidemiological shift of the disease continues in these regions, and what type of future burden hepatitis A may have in a hypothetical rapidly developing country.

Initially, annual hepatitis A mortality was regressed on the Human Development Index (HDI) for each country classified as an emerging and growth-leading economy (EAGLE) to provide an overview of how economic development and hepatitis A mortality related. Data from the various EAGLE countries were also fit to a model of hepatitis A mortality rates in relation to HDI, which were both weighted by each country’s 1995–2010 population of available data, in order to create a model for a hypothetical emerging market country. A second regression model was fit for the weighted average annual hepatitis A mortality rate of all EAGLE countries from the years 1995 to 2010. Additionally, hepatitis A mortality rate was regressed on year.

Regression results show a constant decline of mortality as HDI increased. For each increase of one in HDI value in this hypothetical country, mortality rate declined by 2.3016 deaths per 100,000 people. The hypothetical country showed the HDI value increasing by 0.0073 each year. Also, results displayed a decrease in hepatitis A mortality rate of 0.0168 per 100,000 people per year. Finally, the mortality rate for hepatitis A in this hypothetical country is projected to be down to 0.11299 deaths per 100,000 people by 2030 and its economic status will fall just below the HDI criteria for a developed country by 2025.

The hypothetical country as a prototype model was created from the results of regressed data from EAGLE countries. It is aimed to display an example of the health and economic changes occurring in these rapidly developing regions in order to help understand potential hepatitis A trends, while underscoring the importance of informed and regular policy updates in the coming years. The author believes this regression provides insight into the patterns of hepatitis A mortality and HDI as these EAGLE countries undergo rapid development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of companies’ voluntary adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as well as the readability of privacy statements on US customers’ intention to disclose information and their trust in a company.

Building on the construal level theory and psychological distance, the authors conduct a 2 × 2 + 2 between-participants experiment with 255 participants.

The findings show that a company’s voluntary adoption of the GDPR has positive effects on customers’ intention to disclose information to and their trust in that company. In addition, the effects of GDPR adoption are stronger when the adopting company’s privacy statements possess a higher level of readability.

The authors believe this study poses policy implications for the outcomes of GDPR adoption and the recent debate on both a stricter data breach and privacy regulation.

This study examines individual ambiguity attitudes alone and in groups by leveraging the descriptive model of anchoring and adjustment on decision-making under ambiguity. The study extends Ellsberg's probability ambiguity to outcome ambiguity and examines decisions made under both ambiguities, at different likelihood levels and under the domain of gains and losses.

The methodology selected for this study is a two-stage within-subject lab experiment, with participants from different Indian universities. Each participant made 12 lottery decisions at the individual level and at individuals in the group level.

The results show that ambiguity attitudes are not universal in nature. Ambiguity seeking as a dominant choice was observed at both the individual level and at individual in the group level. However, the magnitude of ambiguity seeking or ambiguity aversion contingent upon the domain of gains and losses differed widely across the individual level and at individuals in the group level.

The study enables to contribute toward giving a robust descriptive explanation for individual behavior in real-world applications of finance. It aims to provide direction for theoretical normative models to accommodate heterogeneity of ambiguity attitudes.

The study is novel as it examines a two-dimensional approach by representing ambiguity in probability and in outcomes. It also analyzes whether decisions under ambiguity vary when individuals make decisions alone and when they make it in groups.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify critical issues underlying the national culture dimensions of Hofstede and GLOBE, demonstrating their irrelevance to international marketing decision‐making.

In‐depth discussion of the theoretical and empirical logic underlying the national culture dimension scales and scores.

Hofstede and GLOBE national culture scores are averages of items that are unrelated and which do not form a valid and reliable scale for the culture dimensions at the level of individuals or organizations. Hence these scores cannot be used to characterize individuals or sub‐groups within countries. The national culture dimension scores are therefore of doubtful use for marketing management that is concerned with individual‐and segment‐level consumer behavior.

Researchers should be cautious in using the Hofstede and GLOBE national culture dimension scores for analysis at the level of individuals and organizations.

Hofstede and GLOBE dimension scores should not be used to infer individual/managerial and group/organizational level behavior and preferences.

The paper follows a recent paper in IMR which was the first to discuss the common misunderstanding of the Hofstede and GLOBE national culture scales and scores, and their misapplication at the level of individuals and organizations by scholars and practitioners. Here we further expand and clarify the issues.

This paper aims to report on homebuyers’ preferences and willingness to pay for installed home photovoltaic systems. Their influence on the market position of a dwelling is relatively unknown. Considering that expected lifespan of photovoltaic systems is at least 25 years, it is likely that many dwellings with a photovoltaic system will enter the housing market.

Few houses with installed photovoltaic systems have been sold in the market to date. Lack of real market data imposes a method based on the stated preference data. Therefore, the general preferences toward photovoltaic systems are determined by a discrete choice model based on responses of 227 homebuyers in the Eindhoven region, The Netherlands. Further, the model estimates were used to assess the indirect willingness to pay for home photovoltaic systems. This initial willingness to pay is further reassessed with the direct willingness to pay collected in an open-ended questionnaire format.

Results of the model show that the homebuyers’ preferences for home photovoltaic systems are large and significant. In addition to general preferences, this article reports on the taste heterogeneity carried out by separating observations based on the respondents’ characteristics. For example, photovoltaic systems are more appealing to homebuyers in more urban or central neighbourhoods. Further, the results of the direct survey lead to the conclusion that people are probably willing to pay close to the replacement value of the system and only 22 per cent of all respondents did not want to pay anything for the installed photovoltaic system.

These findings are exploratory and they raise a number of questions for further investigations, such as those regarding the real estate value of the installed photovoltaic systems. The reported findings must be regarded as local, thus further research is necessary to understand the impact on European housing markets.

Preferences and willingness to pay for home photovoltaic systems can provide a variety of economic, social and political recommendations to different interested parties such as homeowners, buyers, realtors, retailers, energy companies and governments. For instance, a homeowner would like to know what would be the effect of a photovoltaic system on the housing market.

As per the knowledge of authors, this is the first paper to estimate the impact of an installed photovoltaic system on housing choice, measured by stated choice data in the local housing market. It expands the existing body of knowledge for increasingly important issues of valuing and measuring preferences for photovoltaic systems installed on dwellings.

The goal of this exploratory study was to investigate if, when asked to state their preferences for the allocation of public monies toward broad governmental functions, individuals state them at random or if their choice follows some rational pattern that can be traced using explanatory variables.

The paper presents the results of a survey conducted in Greece, Italy and Switzerland where the contingent allocation method was applied to a hypothetical allocation scenario of public monies to the functions of the government.

Findings based on 428 answers revealed that individuals were able to state their preferences for the various functions of the government as well as discriminate between the relative utility of each task and that the country context and personal characteristics significantly influence the respondents' allocations.

From a policy perspective, understanding citizen preferences in budget allocation may help governments rationalize the spending of public money.