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The aim of the research reported is to investigate consumers'reactions to advertisements containing misleading information on price. The underlying thesis is that such advertising generates negative consumer reactions in terms of attitude and intention and that these are heightened in the presence of suspicion.

A qualitative study was employed to identify the most frequently used misleading price communication strategies in Italy, and subsequently, an experimental study examined consumer response to a selection of advertisements that rely on these.

The qualitative study allows for the development of a typology of eight different misleading price communication practices which includes those based on the provision of purely false information alongside those employing an unclear or incomplete application of complex price communication strategies. The experimental study reveals that, when price information is communicated using misleading practices, consumers develop lower levels of trustworthiness toward the source of information as well as willingness to buy. Furthermore, these effects are heightened in the presence of suspicion.

These results provide evidence that consumers may react unfavourably to misleading price information. In addition, the research demonstrates that this negative response is greater for suspicious rather than non‐suspicious consumers.

The paper contributes to the growing body of literature that demonstrates consumers' negative reactions to unclear and incomplete price information generated by the misleading usage of complex price communication strategies.

With the outset of automatic detection of information, misinformation, and disinformation, the purpose of this paper is to examine and discuss various conceptions of information, misinformation, and disinformation within philosophy of information.

The examinations are conducted within a Gricean framework in order to account for the communicative aspects of information, misinformation, and disinformation as well as the detection enterprise.

While there often is an exclusive focus on truth and falsity as that which distinguish information from misinformation and disinformation, this paper finds that the distinguishing features are actually intention/intentionality and non-misleadingness/misleadingness – with non-misleadingness/misleadingness as the primary feature. Further, the paper rehearses the argument in favor of a true variety of disinformation and extends this argument to include true misinformation.

The findings are novel and pose a challenge to the possibility of automatic detection of misinformation and disinformation. Especially the notions of true disinformation and true misinformation, as varieties of disinformation and misinformation, which force the true/false dichotomy for information vs mis-/disinformation to collapse.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of disagreement between companies and consumers with respect to misleading information and to make suggestions as to how the conflict might be resolved.

Based on qualitative research methods, the authors discuss possible grounds for controversies with respect to product information and present a possible framework, inspired by the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, for examining these controversies.

An analysis of arguments shows that consumer representatives and companies, not surprisingly, agree on general moral principles as, for instance, the importance of not lying about the product; however they tend to disagree about where the boundaries between acceptable and misleading information should be drawn in practice. The findings point to the fact that the differences might partly be explained by Boltanski and Thévenots' “orders of worth” and that this classification would seem to provide a fruitful tool for identifying the character and basis of differences of opinions regarding whether or not product information is deemed to be misleading and hence form the basis for a new tool in the management toolbox for testing potentially misleading information.

The data behind the analysis are limited and retrieved in a Danish environment, for which reason more research should be carried out in order to broaden the perspectives of the research.

To reduce controversies the paper proposes a reciprocal recognition of the particular order of worth from which an assessment is made.

Qualitative methods, in this case the combination of qualitative interviews combined with an analysis of arguments, shed light on the core problem concerning misleading information.

This research aims to investigate the impacts of misleading hotel website photos on consumers’ brand trust, emotional responses and negative word-of-mouth (WOM) intention. The magnitude of these impacts in different contexts was examined.

This study employed a 2 (hotel segment: economy vs upscale) × 2 (expected product experience: hedonic vs utilitarian) scenario-based experimental design. A total of 240 consumers participated in this study.

The study results show that, in the case of misleading hotel website photos, brand trust was lower for the upscale hotel. Consumers experienced greater anger and regret in the upscale hotel situation and were most angry if they stayed at an upscale hotel for a hedonic purpose. The eWOM intention was higher in the upscale hotel situation. In addition, it was found that hotel physical environment was more important for female and married consumers.

A hypothetical brand name was used in this study. Therefore, brand attitude changes and the influences of brand loyalty on consumers’ responses to misleading website photos were not examined.

Upscale hotels and hotels that target leisure consumers need to make an effort to use truthful website photos and ensure that the physical environment is well maintained.

No prior research investigated the impact of misleading hotel website photos. This research fills this gap in the hospitality literature.

It is undoubtedly the case that advertising plays a significant part in modern economic life in most societies and many view it as an essential part of the operation of a free market system. Yet it is also the case that our knowledge of how exactly it works and whether the vast amounts spent on it are justified is still uncertain. Lord Leverhulme, the founder of Lever Brothers, is credited with the famous aphorism — ‘one half of advertising does not work but nobody knows which half’ and that perhaps sums up the situation very well. One thing that is generally accepted is that some protection must be provided both to consumers and trade competitors from false or misleading advertising which can lead to market distortions and economic loss to purchasers. Increasingly controversial, however, is the scope and extent of legal and voluntary controls on advertising. In the advertising industry fears are rising about the volume of both national and EEC proposals to restrict or limit advertising and as we move from the '80s, a decade of conspicuous consumption in which advertising flourished, to the caring '90s where environmental issues are to the fore, the advertising industry faces major challenges. Advertising as a whole is facing severe economic and legal challenges after the massive expansion of the 1980's — it is estimated that there was a 4% fall in real terms in UK advertising expenditure in the first quarter of 1990 and an estimated 5% fall in the second quarter. Clients are becoming more demanding and the cosy cartel arrangement whereby advertising agencies made a 15% standard commission on a client's expenditure has gone — commissions are down to 12%‐13% or being replaced by fixed fees. It has been estimated by the Advertising Association that proposed legal restrictions could lead to a loss of £1 bn in revenue for the industry. Multi‐farious pressure groups are campaigning against drink advertising, cigarette advertising and sexism in adverts. The advertising industry's concerns are reflected in a recent report by the Advertising Association — ‘A Freedom Under Threat — Advertising in the EC’. The report indicates a number of areas where legislative controls have been introduced or are proposed to be introduced over the next few years and expresses the fear that controls may be going too far in limiting freedom of ‘commercial speech’. Martin Boase, chairman of the Advertising Association writes in his introduction to the report:

The purpose of this paper is to explore how sales compensation disclosure, salespeople’s perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) toward customers (i.e. customer-focused CSR), regulatory knowledge and coworkers’ ethical behavior may influence life insurance salespeople’s moral intensity and intentions to engage in misleading sales behaviors.

The hypotheses are analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) regression with the data gathered from full-time life insurance salespeople in Taiwan.

The main findings indicate that disclosing sales compensations will alter the ethical decision-making process of life insurance salespeople. The findings further point out that customer-focused CSR is an important variable affecting moral intensity and ethical intentions.

There has not been any research on the effects of compensation disclosure on moral intensity and misleading sales behavior. The literature gap has led to a poor understanding of the relationship between the compensation disclosure policy and ethical sales behavior. Moreover, previous studies indicate that specific factors (such as moral intensity and ethical intention) are directly associated, while the research shows that as long as a regulatory policy (e.g. the policy of compensation disclosure) changes, the correlation between these variables may shift from significant to nonsignificant (or vice versa). The results are interesting enough to warrant more research, and they also show that the direct link between variables mentioned in previous research is not always stable or universal.

Advertisements for dietary supplements (DS) often include misleading claims regarding their health benefits. In this study, the authors designed an online advertisement for plant-based DS featuring misleading claims and investigated its effects on mature Chinese consumers before and after revealing the false claims. A consumer involvement framework was developed to evaluate the mediating effect of advertising involvement (AI) on the correlation between product involvement (PI), situational involvement (SI) and purchase intention (PI).

A total of 467 mature adults aged over 40 years who resided in China's Yangtze River Delta region and had experience in purchasing DS online were recruited. Relevant data were collected through an online survey and analysed through structural equation modelling.

Cognitive PI was positively correlated with both SI and PI and SI was positively correlated with PI. AI negatively moderated the correlation between affective PI and SI. Both cognitive PI and AI were positively correlated with PI and the correlation was mediated through SI.

DS consumption is a rational decision-making process driven by utilitarian motives. Consumers who are aware of the misleading claims adopt a cautious evaluation approach and place themselves in specific purchase situations before making a purchase decision. This study advances the literature by incorporating the consideration of misleading advertisements into the consumer involvement model within the context of online DS consumption. The study's findings provide insights to intensify monitoring of false advertisements in the DS industry and design effective consumer education programmes.

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of misleading experiences, and how decision‐makers' experience can sometimes lead them to think they are right when they are really wrong.

Literature was reviewed in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and decision theory on how people make decisions and what decision‐making biases influence thinking. A total of 83 strategic decisions were studied to understand what potential biases existed and how those biases affected the quality of decision making.

Decision making is more often an emotional than rational process, in large part because of how our brains are wired. This process works most of the time, but not always. As a result, it is critical to identify those red flag conditions where our decisions are most vulnerable to error, with misleading experiences being one of the most central of these red flags. The paper discusses how to identify whether misleading experiences are potentially dangerous.

While the paper relies on multiple literatures and the authors' own original empirical work, a topic as complex as how our brains make decisions clearly cannot lead to definitive conclusions. Future research might investigate more of the contingency situations where misleading experiences might be dangerous.

This study is the first that highlights how central misleading experiences can be to mistaken decision making. It is based on significant original research, and has implications that are clearly practical for business leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature and content of the laws relating to market abuse with a view to determining whether they only offer a civil law remedy for the State. The three categories of insider dealing as defined by the Criminal Justice Act 1993 clearly offer a criminal law based response, but as is shown here virtually all cases of market abuse can potentially be a basis for a criminal prosecution.

The methodology adopted is to consider the other relevant areas of law, namely the Fraud Act 2006, the law of conspiracy to defraud and the law relating to misleading communications under s.397 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and then to determine whether between them they cover all the areas of behaviour caught by the definitions of market abuse.

The consequences of this paper are that the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Conduct Authority now have the option in almost any case of market abuse of considering whether a criminal or civil law approach is appropriate.

The approach adopted over the last two years by the prosecuting authorities of using the criminal law to a greater extent in serious cases of insider dealing can now be extended to market abuse generally where it is thought appropriate.

The Italian legislature GAVE to the Italian Competition Authority has an increasingly prominent role for the consumer protection over the years, especially giving the possibility to impose fines against companies. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the Italian system of consumer protection, studying the impact of these fines on the Italian agrifood companies till 2012.

Grounded theory approach was used in order to formulate new hypothesis from emerging data. Information and data were collected through several sources: interviews with key informants of ICA, secondary data from ICA database, a survey run among companies that received a penalty from ICA during the period 2007-2012, companies website, LexisNexis database and National print and web media titles.

From the analysis it emerges that there is an accurate system planned for avoiding and limiting misleading practices. Firms in fact have been capable to adapt to the set of imposed rules and to reduce the efficacy of the proposed dissuasive system.

The originality of this study regards the way in which the consumer protection was investigated, in fact it takes into account the relationships between ICA and IAP, two of the most important players of consumer protection in Italy. Moreover, the study is focussed on the agrifood sector. The authors give some recommendations for future interventions focussing on the length of time of the process, which could have a positive impact on the effectiveness of sanctions.