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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the particularities of the time consumption of transactions performed in an insurance firm and the prospective impact on costing.

This paper uses the results of an archival study conducted on data collected in an insurance firm.

The results suggest that the reasons underlying the heterogeneity of transactions’ time consumption are multiple and rule out a systematic and unique explanation. They lend support to the importance of the “human effect” in explaining the time consumption of service transactions and support the need for more research into the evolution of marketing thought that subordinates the concept of transaction to the concept of relationship. In addition, our results not only suggest that the drivers of time consumption and their importance are contingent on the type of service activity performed within the same firm, but also that inside a generic service activity, deviations in time consumption remain due to the provision of specific services.

Services have their own characteristics which make it difficult to trace their resource consumption. Yet limited research has focused on examining the impact of services’ characteristics on predicting costs. Our findings contribute to our understanding of such impact and cast doubt on the possibility of obtaining accurate costs for very detailed transactions for an acceptable cost-benefit trade-off.

This paper argues that there is a need to theorize socially constituted temporal phenomena, such as the fragmentation and multiplication of futures in media representations of technology, since this contextualizes consumption in important ways.

However, this argument requires a critique of agentic bias in phenomenological approaches to time. By drawing on Husserl, Heidegger and Ricœur, it is shown that phenomenological time is fundamentally intersubjective and contextualized in a tension between chronological and experienced time, rather than first and foremost created and felt by the individual consumer subject or experienced only as “flow.” This implies a switch from an egological to a sociological approach to time and consumption.

Thus, the multiplication of socially constituted narratives about the future, in late-modernity, disrupts instrumental modes of thinking about the consumer object, making it “unhandy” and “disturbing.” The meaning of the object therefore becomes “damaged.” However, this also allows the possibility for it to be known in wholly new ways.

Since many definitions of consumption are future oriented, the fragmentation of the future speaks to how we form meanings about consumption. Thus, a socially constituted theory of consumer temporality impacts the experience of consumer objects.

This theorization of time and consumption suggests the possibility of comparative studies of temporality to understand the universe in which consumer choices can unfold.

This is the first attempt to apply the epistemological criteria from the context of context debate in regard to consumer temporality.

Contrary to the implications of economic theory, consumption inequality in the United States did not react to the increases in income inequality during the last three decades. This paper investigates if a change in the type of income inequality – from permanent to transitory – or a change in the ability to insure income shocks is responsible for this. A measure of household consumption is imputed into the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to create panel data on income and consumption for the period 1980–2010. The minimum distance investigation of covariance relationships shows that both explanations work together: the share of transitory shocks increases over time, but the capability to insure against permanent and transitory income shocks also improves. Together, these phenomena can explain the lack of an increase in consumption inequality.

The appearance of the present chapter six years after the publication of Marx's Capital and more than a year after its translation into Russian might seem somewhat untimely, if not entirely superfluous. Who in our country has not read Marx's works, or at least heard of him; who does not know that besides interesting and instructive facts, his work contains new and important socio-political truths? No doubt many have read it and heard of it, but I permit myself to doubt, and not only in an a priori fashion, but on the basis of extensive observation, whether many have gained from a reading of the book a clear and precise understanding of the topics which are treated therein. Are there many who have managed to distinguish in it what is significant from what is of small importance, who have noticed what constituted the core elements or the framework of the whole theoretical edifice as opposed to the detail, which serves only to decorate it, who have been properly aware, what Marx introduced that was new into the consciousness of his contemporaries, and what, on the contrary, did not belong to him, but to his predecessors? We repeat that from frequent observations we have become convinced of the contrary. With some very few exceptions, we have so far not managed to come across people who have understood the significance of Marx's researches in their entirety. Some – and these constitute the majority – are barred on the way to an elucidation of the essence of the matter by Marx's doctrine of the forms of value; others – by the difficult, and, if the truth be told, somewhat scholastic language in which a considerable part of the book is written; and others again are put off by the unaccustomed complexity of the subject and the ponderous argumentation encased in the impenetrable armor of Hegelian contradictions. And not only in Russia, but abroad as well Marx has fared no better. One only has to read reviews by some Baumert, Siebel or the reviewer in Bruno–Hildebrand's Jahrbücher, R. (presumably Rössler) to see at once that all these gentlemen possess one important advantage over the majority of Russian readers in that they not only could not, but also would not understand Marx's investigations. Thus, the above reviewer puts to Marx, among others, the following question: “we would like it if someone were finally to explain to us why the food which finds its way into the stomach of a worker serves as the source of the formation of surplus value, whereas food eaten by a horse or an ox lacks the same significance.” If such a “someone” were really to be found, in which the author of the review expresses serious doubt, then he would probably explain the matter in the following way: that economists and sociologists, to whose number Marx belongs, had to date the weakness to think that the chief object of their investigations was human society, and not the society of domestic animals, horned or otherwise, and therefore they are concerned with that surplus value which is produced by human beings. If, like Darwin, they studied natural science, they would probably have found something like surplus value among various other animals, for example, among different species of ant or bee. Generally speaking, not counting Lange's book on the worker question, and the reviews of some people directly involved with the practical consequences of Marx's ideas, the foreign press presents almost not a single line which would evince in its author the desire and the ability to understand the general significance of Marx's work. These deficiencies, especially the second one, are characteristic of even those writers, like Schäffle, who are quite favorably disposed towards Marx and are aware of his scientific achievements.

A number of papers have empirically investigated the demand for cinema by applying the rational addiction model proposed by Becker and Murphy (1988). However, they fail to take account of the relationship between movie and television consumption. The purpose of this paper is to extend previous works on cinema demand by including both cinema and television movie consumption. To this aim a panel-data generalized method of moments (GMM) methodology is used to estimate a dynamic model of double rational addiction as proposed by Bask and Melkersson (2004) using a sample of monthly time- and cross-sectional series covering the 20 Italian regions over the period 2000–2002.

The consensus view is that economists should observe consumer choices and abstain from investigating the psychological and physiological causes of wants, or the mechanisms governing the formation of preferences. This may be a correct procedure as far as ordinary functional goods are concerned. Problems tend to arise with creative goods (e.g. cultural goods) whose consumption (i) requires skills acquired through education and experience and (ii) generates positive and negative feedbacks and learning-by-consuming processes. This paper presents a simple model of local learning explaining the idiosyncratic accumulation of consumption human capital. Consumption generates local feedback mechanisms whose characteristics depend on the nature of goods and on the type of agent. The model provides some insights on the microeconomics of creative consumption and on the specific role of education.

There is a paradox in the normative foundations for chronic and intertemporal poverty measurement. Measures that reflect particular aversion to chronicity of poverty cannot also reflect particular aversion to fluctuations in the level of poverty when poverty is intense, yet good arguments are made in favour of each of these properties. I argue that the paradox may be explained if the poverty analyst implicitly predicts that an individual observed to experience persistent poverty will continue to experience poverty when unobserved. The paradox may then be resolved by separating the normative exercise of evaluation, applying a measure that reflects particular aversion to fluctuations, from a positive exercise of modelling and prediction. This proposal is illustrated by application to panel data from rural Ethiopia, covering the period 1994–2004. Several dynamic models are estimated, and a simple model with household-specific trends is found to give the best predictions of future wellbeing levels. Appropriately normalised measures of intertemporal poverty are applied to the predicted and observed trajectories of wellbeing, and results are found to differ substantially from naïve application of the measures to observed periods only. While similar results are obtained by naïve application of the measures that embody particular aversion to chronicity, separation of the normative and positive exercises maintains conceptual clarity.