Melania Salazar-Ordóñez (p), Macario Rodríguez Entrena

There exists two main paradigms to study consumer behaviour: i) the attitudinal approach which analyses consumer behaviour based on beliefs and behavioural intentions; and ii) the judgment and choice approach based on the explanation of how products’ attributes and prices determine the consumption. The most representative exponents of the former are the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behaviour; while the latter is underpinned on the classical utility economic theory of consumer behaviour, mainly on Lancaster Theory.
Both paradigms are controversial, given that its limits. Particularly, the non-inclusion of the hypothetical pre-behavioural events in the attitudinal approach and the failing to neglecting beliefs and emotions in the judgment and choice approach. That conception of analysing consumer behaviour through mutually exclusive paradigms may be limiting their explanatory power.
In this regard, our aim is to obtain more insights regarding the consequences of hybridizing factors from both approaches. In order to do so, we tested how this hybrid framework explains behavioural intention and actions using both stated intentions and actual consumption. The empirical research was performed using a daily product under volitional control such as olive oil and variance-based structural equation modelling (SEM) by means of the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique. The regional data were collected by an online questionnaire survey to 808 usually buyers at household level from medium to big sized cities – more than 100,000 inhabitants – in Southern Spain.
First finding that strikes is the social norms’ variable does not play a role in configuring either stated intention or actual consumption. Attitudes are said to perform higher influence than social norms when explaining stated intentions but, in our case, we can confirm that they can explain actual consumption with the same strength. Other interesting result is the role played by expected outcomes. It has explanatory power for both intentions and consumption. Meanwhile, economic and socio-demographic factors are key to shed light on consumer behaviour in both hybrid models. Finally, the behavioural beliefs about products’ attributes, perceived price and taste, resulted to explain attitudes formation, stated intentions and consumption. Therefore, the results underpin that latent variables from both approaches contribute to explain stated intentions and actual consumption in a similar way. Nonetheless, it is also worth mentioning that the revealed consumption model shows a higher predictive power suggesting a better performance of the predictors, despite studying intention of buy a foodstuff under volitional control.

Zheng Tian, Stephan Goetz (p)

This paper focuses on the turnover of farmers to wage employment in the U.S. and the effect of government subsidies in the transition process. The total number of farmers, measured by farm proprietor employment, has continuously declined by over thirty percent since the 1970s in the U.S., while nonfarm wage employment has risen by ninety percent. To sustain agricultural production, government subsidies to farmers has quadrupled since the 1970s, although the deflated values have reduced by less than three percent. With the county-level data in the period of 1969 to 2016, the prevalence of turnover of farmers to wage employment is first examined with the Granger causality test for each county. Since the Granger causality test requires stationary time series but farmers and wage employment data are mostly non-stationary, the first step of analysis uses the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test to filter out counties of which both the first-order-differenced farmers and wage employment are nonstationary, resulting in 1941 counties to be used in the test and the following estimation. The test shows up 316 counties in which farmer employment Granger-causes wage employment. Further, because the data set is a panel data with a large number of counties and a long time period, we estimate the magnitude of Granger-causality with both the LSDV and GMM estimation method for dynamic panel models, along with government payments to farmers and the gap between wages and farmers' incomes as two explanatory variables. The preliminary results show that the lag-2 terms of farmer employment have negative coefficients in most estimated models, which is a sign of the turnover. In some estimations, government payments to farmers counterintuitively show a positive effect on wage employment, and the gap between wages and farmers' incomes exhibits a positive effect on wage employment. A problem with the current estimation is that the ADF test excludes a large number of counties from the analysis. In the next step, we propose the estimation of panel cointegration models that allow nonstationary time series.

Fikri Zul Fahmi (p)

This study aims to identify how structural transformation influences subjective well-being of rural residents. Urbanization in developing countries has a relatively more rapid pace. This suggests significant challenges for infrastructure and public service provision. Many rural areas have transformed, as indicated among other things by a structural shift from agricultural to non-agricultural sectors and land use conversion. The penetration of the Internet and information technology onto rural regions have also reshaped the behaviours as well as livelihood strategies of rural residents. A case study is performed in Kaliabu village, Magelang District, Central Java, Indonesia. It presents an interesting condition in which this village was purely an agricultural area, but now some residents have become logo designers who provide their services online to international customers. This economic shift has encouraged changes in the rural area as a whole, in that the village is well-known as 'the village of designers', thereby reshaping socio-cultural and economic characteristics of the village. It is yet unclear as to what extent this transformation influences the extent of life satisfaction and happiness of rural residents. To address this issue, semi-structured in-depth interviews are conducted with the village residents, both with those people involved in the logo design activities and those who are not involved in this emerging rural sector. It is to be expected that there are differences in both groups of residents, suggesting important policy recommendations for managing structural transformation in rural areas, especially in a developing and urbanizing country such as Indonesia.