The neurophysiological Behavioral Perspective Model of consumer choice and its contribution to the intentional behaviorist research programme.

Cognitive explanations raise epistemological problems not faced by accounts confined to observable variables. Many explanatory components of cognitive models are unobservable: beliefs, attitudes, and intentions, for instance, must be made empirically available to the researcher in the form of measures of observable behavior from which the latent variables are inferred. The explanatory variables are abstract and theoretical and rely, if they are to enter investigations and explanations, on reasoned agreement on how they can be captured by proxy variables derived from what people say and how they behave.

Social media sites users' choice between utilitarian and informational reinforcers assessed using temporal discounting.

Objective: This study provides a first approach to the use of the Multiple-Choice Procedure in social media networks use, as well as empirical evidence for the application of the Behavioral Perspective Model to digital consumption behavior in young users in conjunction with a methodology based on behavioral economics.

Participants/methods: The participants were part of a large university in Bogotá, Colombia, and they received an academic credit once they completed the online questionnaire. A total of 311 participants completed the experiment.

Vaccine Refusal: A Preliminary Interdisciplinary Investigation.

Many people who generally receive standard recommended inoculations refuse to partake of COVID-19 vaccines, preventatives that are effective, safe, and life-saving amidst the current pandemic. Our quest is to understand this puzzling and dangerous phenomenon, as it exists among US and UK citizens, whom in other respects would be regarded as quite regular. We will discuss Vaccine Refusal compared with two better understood phenomena: addiction, and akrasia, along with the related matters of human action, intention, agency, will, and identity.

Does excessive use of smartphones and apps make us more impulsive? An approach from behavioural economics.

Purpose: Problematic smartphone use has been associated with negative effects in work and school environments. This study proposes the application of a behavioural economics perspective to establish whether heavy smartphone users show a tendency to devalue the consequences of their behaviour in the long term. To address this proposition, the study sought to establish how an objective measurement of usage time of smartphones and apps might help to predict, firstly, participants' choice behaviour and, secondly, their perceived dependence levels.

The Marketing Firm and the Consumer Organization: A Comparative Analysis With Special Reference to Charitable Organizations.

The accurate delineation of various forms of business organization requires a comparative analysis of their objectives, functions, and organizational structures. In particular, this paper highlights differences in managerial work between business firms and non-profits exemplified by the charitable organization. It adopts as its template the theory of the marketing firm, a depiction of the modern corporation as it responds to the imperatives of customer-oriented management, namely consumer discretion and consumer sophistication.

Building Consumer Understanding by Utilizing a Bayesian Hierarchical Structure within the Behavioral Perspective Model.

This study further develops the theoretical and empirical literature on the Behavioral Perspective Model (BPM) in three ways through an empirical analysis of the Great Britain (GB) biscuit category. First, following a literature review and a category analysis, a more complex model is constructed using the BPM structure and then testing the hypothesis uncovered. Second, the structure of the data theoretically calls for a hierarchical structure of the model, and hence, this is introduced into the BPM framework and is compared to a non-hierarchical structure of the same model.

Consumer Maximization of Utilitarian and Informational Reinforcement: Comparing Two Utility Measures with Reference to Social Class.

Based upon the Behavioral Perspective Model (BPM), previous analysis has shown that consumers tend to maximize utility as a function of the level of utilitarian (functional) and informational (social) reinforcement offered by brands. A model of consumer brand choice was developed, which applied a Cobb-Douglas utility function to the parameters that constitute the BPM, using consumer panel data. The present paper tested a variation of the previous model, which allows for measures of consumer utility at the level of aggregate household, in addition to utility per consumed product unit (e.

NEURAL Networks and Consumer Behavior: NEURAL Models, Logistic Regression, and the Behavioral Perspective Model.

This paper investigates the ability of connectionist models to explain consumer behavior, focusing on the feedforward neural network model, and explores the possibility of expanding the theoretical framework of the Behavioral Perspective Model to incorporate connectionist constructs. Numerous neural network models of varying complexity are developed to predict consumer loyalty as a crucial aspect of consumer behavior. Their performance is compared with the more traditional logistic regression model and it is found that neural networks offer consistent advantage over logistic regression in the prediction of consumer loyalty.

Metacognitive Control of Categorial Neurobehavioral Decision Systems.

The competing neuro-behavioral decision systems (CNDS) model proposes that the degree to which an individual discounts the future is a function of the relative hyperactivity of an impulsive system based on the limbic and paralimbic brain regions and the relative hypoactivity of an executive system based in prefrontal cortex (PFC). The model depicts the relationship between these categorial systems in terms of the antipodal neurophysiological, behavioral, and decision (cognitive) functions that engender normal and addictive responding. However, a case may be made for construing several components of the impulsive and executive systems depicted in the model as categories (elements) of additional systems that are concerned with the metacognitive control of behavior.

The marketing firm and consumer choice: implications of bilateral contingency for levels of analysis in organizational neuroscience.

The emergence of a conception of the marketing firm (Foxall, 1999a) conceived within behavioral psychology and based on a corresponding model of consumer choice, (Foxall, 1990/2004) permits an assessment of the levels of behavioral and organizational analysis amenable to neuroscientific examination. This paper explores the ways in which the bilateral contingencies that link the marketing firm with its consumerate allow appropriate levels of organizational neuroscientific analysis to be specified. Having described the concept of the marketing firm and the model of consumer behavior on which it is based, the paper analyzes bilateral contingencies at the levels of (i) market exchange, (ii) emotional reward, and (iii) neuroeconomics.

Cognitive requirements of competing neuro-behavioral decision systems: some implications of temporal horizon for managerial behavior in organizations.

Interpretation of managerial activity in terms of neuroscience is typically concerned with extreme behaviors such as corporate fraud or reckless investment (Peterson, 2007; Wargo et al., 2010a). This paper is concerned to map out the neurophysiological and cognitive mechanisms at work across the spectrum of managerial behaviors encountered in more day-to-day contexts.

Drug use as consumer behavior.

Seeking integration of drug consumption research by a theory of memory function and emphasizing drug consumption rather than addiction, Müller & Schumann (M&S) treat drug self-administration as part of a general pattern of consumption. This insight is located within a more comprehensive framework for understanding drug use as consumer behavior that explicates the reinforcement contingencies associated with modes of drug consumption.

A behavioral-economic analysis of the essential value of brands.

Recently, Hursh and Silberberg (2008) have advanced a behavior-economic approach to measure the value of reinforcers, in which demand elasticity is measured relative to the point at which price is zero, a technique that allows for comparisons across reinforcers that show different consumption patterns or across different dosages or magnitudes of the same reinforcer. The authors have proposed an exponential model in which the elasticity coefficient measures the essential value of reinforcers. The application of the exponential model in various experiments has shown that it provided a good fit to the data and supplied different theoretically consistent results.

Brand placement and consumer choice: an in-store experiment.

An in-store experiment was performed to investigate the effects of shelf placement (high, middle, low) on consumers' purchases of potato chips. Placement of potato chips on the middle shelf was associated with the highest percentage of purchases. The results confirm the importance of item placement as a factor in consumers' buying behavior.

On the tautology of the matching law in consumer behavior analysis.

Matching analysis has often attracted the criticism that it is formally tautological and hence empirically unfalsifiable, a problem that particularly affects translational attempts to extend behavior analysis into new areas. An example is consumer behavior analysis where application of matching in natural settings requires the inference of ratio-based relationships between amount purchased and amount spent. This gives rise to the argument that matching is an artifact of the way in which the alleged independent and dependent variables are defined and measured.

Effect of preoperative multimedia information on perioperative anxiety in patients undergoing procedures under regional anaesthesia.

Background: Provision of preoperative information can alleviate patients' anxiety. However, the ideal method of delivering this information is unknown. Video information has been shown to reduce patients' anxiety, although little is known regarding the effect of preoperative multimedia information on anxiety in patients undergoing regional anaesthesia.

Delineation of distal ulnar nerve anatomy using ultrasound in volunteers to identify an optimum approach for neural blockade.

Background And Objective: Ultrasound can provide novel approaches to neural blockade independent of surface landmarks. We elucidated the sonoanatomy of the ulnar nerve in the forearm of healthy volunteers in order to identify an optimum site for neural blockade.

Methods: One hundred forearms were scanned; the shape, depth from skin and cross-sectional area of the nerve were noted at the elbow, forearm and wrist.

Three-dimensional, multiplanar, ultrasound-guided, radial nerve block.

Objective: We describe the use of 3-dimensional, multiplanar ultrasound imaging for peripheral nerve block.

Case Report: To illustrate the potential usefulness of the technique, we present a case in which real-time 3-dimensional, multiplanar ultrasound was used to assist in the performance of a radial nerve block.

Conclusions: Three-dimensional, multiplanar ultrasound in real-time has the potential to improve nerve identification and accuracy of needle placement in regional anesthesia.

Ultrasound anatomy of the radial nerve in the distal upper arm.

Background And Objectives: We aimed to describe the ultrasound appearance of the radial nerve in the lateral aspect of the distal upper arm. This procedure was done to identify potential novel sites for ultrasound-guided radial-nerve block.

Methods: We scanned the lateral aspect of the distal upper arm in both arms of 50 healthy adult volunteers (equal gender distribution), using a 38 mm, 5 to 10 MHz, linear ultrasound probe (SonoSite MicroMaxx, Hitchen, UK).

Levobupivacaine-induced seizures and cardiovascular collapse treated with Intralipid.

Lipid emulsion has been used in the successful treatment of local anaesthetic-induced cardiovascular collapse in animals and in two cases of cardiac arrest in humans. Previous reports of levobupivacaine toxicity in humans have been characterised by neurological signs and symptoms, without serious cardiovascular events. We present a case in which presumed intravenous injection of levobupivacaine led to neurological and cardiovascular consequences.

Explaining consumer choice: coming to terms with intentionality.

Any attempt to understand the nature of behaviorism as a philosophy of science, to depict the essence of its distinctive explanatory system, or to delimit the scope of its capacity to explicate behavior, requires an appreciation of how its practitioners use language. Three behaviorist theories that are especially relevant to the explanation of economic behavior - radical behaviorism, teleological behaviorism, and picoeconomics - provide a necessary array of theoretical perspectives in that each contributes uniquely to understanding consumer choice. Despite the differences that separate them at a methodological level, and the internecine disputes in which their adherents sometimes address one another, these three perspectives play complementary roles in the depiction of everyday consumer behavior.

Consumer brand choice: individual and group analyses of demand elasticity.

Following the behavior-analytic tradition of analyzing individual behavior, the present research investigated demand elasticity of individual consumers purchasing supermarket products, and compared individual and group analyses of elasticity. Panel data from 80 UK consumers purchasing 9 product categories (i.e.

Foreign body ingestion causing gastric and diaphragmatic perforation in a child.

Foreign body ingestion is a common problem in children. Most ingested foreign bodies pass through the gastrointestinal tract without difficulty once they reach the stomach. Perforation of the gastrointestinal tract very rarely occurs.

The behavioral economics of consumer brand choice: patterns of reinforcement and utility maximization.

Purchasers of fast-moving consumer goods generally exhibit multi-brand choice, selecting apparently randomly among a small subset or "repertoire" of tried and trusted brands. Their behavior shows both matching and maximization, though it is not clear just what the majority of buyers are maximizing. Each brand attracts, however, a small percentage of consumers who are 100%-loyal to it during the period of observation.