Jenna Barrett

Income is considered a key driver of sustainable consumption. While descriptive studies suggest strong links between income and sustainability, its causal effect on the environmental impact of food consumption remains unclear. This study estimates the income elasticity of the environmental impact of household grocery purchases, the primary source of household food choices. Using panel data that includes (1) household-level scanner data on grocery purchases in two European countries and the United States, (2) product category-level environmental impact estimates, we report that a 1% increase in income leads to only a 0.02%, 0.04%, and 0.01% rise in food-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, respectively. We test whether this small effect masks opposing impacts on quantity versus composition of shopping baskets, but find minor effects in both dimensions. Robustness checks show our findings hold across sub-samples and time horizons, including persistence and magnitude of income changes. Administrative income data for the same households and periods in the Nether lands demonstrate our findings are not driven by imprecise measurement of income. Overall, income variation has limited influence on shifts toward lower-carbon-footprint grocery consumption, which has implications for policies to reduce environmental externalities in food consumption, and for income-based targeting strategies in the retail sector.

In the last decade, customer engagement has become a key concept in service research. While the customer engagement literature has gained significant traction and is maturing, studies have predominantly focused on hedonic consumption contexts, such as social media platforms or brand communities. We argue that hedonic and utilitarian service services are fundamentally different. Therefore, existing research knowledge on customer engagement does not necessarily hold in more utilitarian contexts, such as healthcare or financial services, where greater customer engagement could increase societal and individual well-being. By synthesizing insights from the customer engagement literature and the literature on hedonic versus utilitarian consumption, we identify assumptions in customer engagement research that need revising. We extract five fundamental features that differ between hedonic and utilitarian services (affectivity, motivational focus, perception of necessity, role of risk, and relational focus). Based on these features, we derive propositions that describe the role of context for the drivers and outcomes of customer engagement, as well as their interrelationships, and provide guidelines for future research to augment the scope of customer engagement research. As its main contribution, this article problematizes the current premises of customer engagement research and demonstrates that assumptions held about customer engagement are not necessarily generalizable across contexts.

The increasing complexity of the modern financial landscape presents significant challenges for individuals’ financial well-being. In this study, we aim to investigate the relationship between cognitive ability and financial well-being by utilizing data from the British Cohort Study, which follows a sample of 13,000 individuals from birth in 1970 to the present day. Our objective is to examine the functional form of this relationship while controlling for factors such as childhood socio-economic status and adult income. Previous research has established a correlation between cognitive ability and financial well-being, but has implicitly assumed a linear relationship. Our analyses indicate that the majority of the relationships between cognitive ability and financial variables are monotonic. However, we also observe non-monotonic relationships, particularly for credit usage, suggesting a curvilinear relationship where both lower and higher levels of cognitive ability are associated with lower levels of debt. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of cognitive ability in financial well-being and for financial education and policy, as the complexity of the modern financial landscape poses significant challenges for individuals’ financial well-being. As financial complexity is increasing and cognitive ability is a key predictor of knowledge acquisition, misspecifying the true relationship between cognitive ability and financial outcomes leads to an undervaluation of the role of cognitive ability for financial well-being.