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This paper aims to highlight differences between business and non-business literature regarding base of the pyramid (BoP) and subsistence contexts and reveal discourse’s powerful role in influencing goals, solutions and outcomes.

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to review a convenience sample of business versus non-business literature on the BoP and subsistence contexts.

Discourse used in business literature on the BoP is oriented toward hegemonic Western capitalist approaches that result in the depletion of resources, resource inequalities, poverty and increased consumption, dependence and environmental degradation and, therefore, cannot alleviate poverty.

There are two primary limitations: the study relied on a convenience sample that was not random and comparatively, the business BoP literature is not as mature as the non-business subsistence literature and, therefore, the BoP field of study is not yet fully developed.

Discourse has a powerful role in revealing assumptions and guiding actions. A change in BoP discourse toward a strength-based approach can serve as a model of sustainability and can help powerful entities enact structural and systemic change.

This paper reveals the role of discourse in business BoP literature and how it perpetuates and even exacerbates the problems they were designed to alleviate: depletion of resources, resource inequalities, poverty and increased consumption, dependence and environmental degradation. The paper challenges researchers, economists and powerful guiding entities to reorient their discourse of the BoP to be more aligned with those of non-business researchers of subsistence markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why poor people make decisions that at first sight appear irrational. The author stays within the realms of classical consumption theory, and investigates preference-based explanations. The author studies the case of rickshaw rental versus purchase. One-year rent is sufficient to buy a rickshaw in the plains of Nepal, while a rickshaw will last many years, so purchase appears very profitable. Still most cyclists rent the rickshaw.

Based on choices made by rickshaw cyclists between hypothetical financing schemes for rickshaws we investigate whether the explanation is a high time-preference rate or a high elasticity of the marginal utility of consumption, which in turn can be explained by preferences that are formed by consumption near a subsistence level.

The authors find that subsistence constraints are more important than high time-preference rates. In short, many rickshaw cyclists switch from profitable investment decisions to myopic choices if the weekly payments are too high.

In contrast to standard bidding-forms, the methodology does not allow for exact estimates of the implied time-preference rate or the elasticity of the marginal utility of consumption.

Microcredit has no role if people are subsistence constraint, as they will need to save every day also to repay loans.

The findings indicate that myopic choices by poor people are not due to myopic preferences, but rather that the disutility of reducing consumption today is too high.

The authors believe bidding-forms are too complex for field experiments among people with no, or minimal, education. The simple hypothetical choices we have constructed appear to work.

In August 2006, 85 academicians and practitioners from industry and the nonprofit sector came together on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago for a conference unlike others in recent management research history. This conference focused on the subsistence marketplace and its constituents – the billions of individuals and families living in substandard housing, with limited or no education; having limited or no access to sanitation, potable water, and health care; and earning minimal incomes. Subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs have been largely ignored by contemporary marketing and management research and practice, but are poised to become a driving force in 21st century economic and business development. It is expected that as many as 1 billion new consumers wielding discretionary income will enter global markets before 2020. In addition, even among those consumers who lack discretionary income, it is expected that they will be much more active in the marketplace in the near future, because of expanded access to products and information through the Internet and wireless technologies (Davis & Stephenson, 2006). Moreover, the combined purchasing power of these consumers, already in the trillions of dollars, is likely to grow at higher rates than that of consumers in industrialized economies. These factors come together to suggest that consumer markets will need to adjust radically to the needs and demands of these emerging markets over the next 2 to 3 decades, even though companies and scholars across the business disciplines know very little about subsistence consumers. It was this need for knowledge about subsistence marketplaces that inspired the conference and the research presented here.

This chapter offers the first full translation from Russian to English of the Balance of the National Economy of the USSR, 1924–26’s first chapter. Involving 12 authors and composed of 21 chapters, the Balance is a collective work published in June 1926 in Moscow by the Soviet Central Statistical Administration under the scientific supervision of its former director, Pavel Illich Popov (1872–1950). In this first chapter, titled ‘Studying the Balance of the National Economy: An Introduction’, Popov set the theoretical foundations of what might be considered as the first modern national accounting system and paved the way to multisector macroeconometric modelling.

Pro-poor innovations are innovations targeted at economically poor consumers. These innovations have the potential to improve consumer wellbeing. However, while take up of some such innovations has been rapid (e.g., mobile phones) take up of others has been slower (e.g., fuel efficient stoves). What explains why some pro-poor innovations fail and some succeed? While the literature on consumer innovation adoption in economically wealthy countries is vast, there is very little literature in the context of the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” (BoP) and subsistence marketplaces. This chapter aims to begin answering this question through a review of the extant literature in the area of consumer innovation adoption, which is integrated with literature in the area of consumption within subsistence marketplaces and the BoP. A conceptual model is proposed which outlines key parameters for marketers and managers. The chapter closes by outlining implications and a future research agenda.

This paper aims to consider few cognitive and conceptual obstacles to engagement with global catastrophic risks (GCRs).

The paper starts by considering cognitive biases that affect general thinking about GCRs, before questioning whether existential risks really are dramatically more pressing than other GCRs. It then sets out a novel typology of GCRs – sexy vs unsexy risks – before considering a particularly unsexy risk, overpopulation.

It is proposed that many risks commonly regarded as existential are “sexy” risks, while certain other GCRs are comparatively “unsexy.” In addition, it is suggested that a combination of complexity, cognitive biases and a hubris-laden failure of imagination leads us to neglect the most unsexy and pervasive of all GCRs: human overpopulation. The paper concludes with a tentative conceptualisation of overpopulation as a pattern of risking.

The paper proposes and conceptualises two new concepts, sexy and unsexy catastrophic risks, as well as a new conceptualisation of overpopulation as a pattern of risking.

Some labor supply curves exhibit inflection points at which they bend backward or fall forward; thus, some workers alternate between increasing and decreasing their labor hours as wages increase. No consensus has yet been reached on the underlying motive for such behavioral inconsistencies. This paper aims to develop a unified theory to explain each of these variations in labor supply.

The author employs a simple model of labor supply with additively separable utility over income and leisure. The sub-utility function for income is of the Friedman-Savage type, exhibiting preferences that alternate between increasing and diminishing marginal utility of income.

Labor supply curves slope downward where relative risk aversion is strong, and upward where relative risk aversion is weak or negative. Thus, utility functions with inflection points can form the basis of labor supply curves with inflection points.

Friedman-Savage utility can explain virtually any observed labor supply functions, including convex, backward-bending, forward-falling, and inverted-S curves.

Inflection points on the labor supply curve can create multiple and unstable market equilibria. Labor-market policies, including legislation pertaining to minimum wages and collective bargaining, and policies to enhance education and economic security, may reduce aversion to risk and thereby decrease the prevalence of unstable equilibria.

This paper unites two lines of research – labor supply and Friedman-Savage utility – which have, rather remarkably, been separate to date. In doing so, it provides a new application of the classic Friedman-Savage paradigm, and a new explanation of labor supply curves with negatively-sloped regions.

How do people with few material resources manage their consumption lives? We address this question by investigating the consumption practices and processes of 27 subsistence consumers in South Africa. These individuals are economically active, underserved consumers who either had in the past or have today few resources in terms of income, employment, and education; most of these consumer–informants grew up in and/or live in urban townships populated by poor black South Africans. Our interpretation is based on family systems theory and centers on analyses showing that subsistence consumers enact strategies to cope with the chronic stress of resource allocation needs for the family that outpace resource generation. The repertoire of strategies includes: (1) adhering to resource generation opportunities, (2) accessing new resources, (3) talking to family members, (4) trying and striving, (5) sacrificing, and (6) risking. These strategies are discussed in light of family systems theory, consumer behavior research, and marketing to subsistence consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss innovative consumer marketing approaches for simultaneous business success and social empowerment at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) or in subsistence marketplaces.

The paper draws from a research program comprising qualitative methods as well as case study analyses. The central aspect of the approach to this topic is that it is a bottom‐up perspective grounded in understanding consumers. The theoretical scope of the paper includes consumption, entrepreneurship, and social capital in impoverished environments.

The authors' key finding is that businesses must follow three principles for consumer marketing – deep understanding of subsistence consumer psychology, social embeddedness, and entrepreneurial empowerment.

This research has implications for theoretical and empirical advancement in the areas of structuring marketing activities, social embeddedness of marketing, and consumer policy.

This research has implications for several aspects of consumer marketing strategy. The authors categorize these under the following: marketplace research, marketplace solutions, value propositions, communications, partnerships, harnessing social capital, designing marketing structure, and evolving the marketing mindset.

This paper suggests that consumption and entrepreneurial productivity are inextricably linked in subsistence contexts with important implications for consumer marketing. The paper has value to BOP researchers and BOP business practitioners wishing to take a nuanced view to understand their markets and serve them better.

In this paper we propose a typology of firm-stakeholder relationships based on four different states of consumption, leading to a new model of business commitment to responsible consumption. In developing this typology, we apply a physiological theory of consumption to define business as a nexus of activities capable of producing four different types of value: subsistence, growth, indifference and excess. The model represents a more coherent conceptualization of business management, drawing upon long-term multi-dimensional value management in firm-stakeholder relations. Thus, in our model, we establish normative connections between value creation and responsible consumption, and indicate more specific measures of value creation for stakeholders, by promoting subsistence and growth, and discouraging indifference and excess. We are thus taking value creation stakeholder theory one step further, by exploring how different levels of value or utility could inform integrative, convergent value creation processes within the firm as a network of stakeholders.