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Internet advertising, while enabling unprecedented commercial reach, has become a pervasive vehicle for deceptive practices that inflict measurable harm on consumers. This study empirically investigates the structural relationships between internet advertising falsity and consumer harm by integrating analyses of the mediating role of consumer cognitive processes and the moderating role of consumer vulnerability within a unified structural framework. Survey data were collected from 600 adult consumers with online purchase experience in the Republic of Korea—an advanced digital economy characterized by exceptionally high mobile-commerce penetration, mature e-commerce infrastructure, and evolving digital consumer protection regulation—and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with AMOS 24.0, supplemented by Hayes’ PROCESS macro Model 59 for conditional process analysis. All 13 hypotheses were supported, although path magnitudes varied substantially across falsity dimensions and mediator pathways—with direct effects ranging from β = 0.156 (false scarcity) to β = 0.224 (performance exaggeration), and indirect effects dominated by the risk assessment distortion pathway. Among the four sub-dimensions of advertising falsity—factual misrepresentation, performance exaggeration, price deception, and false scarcity—performance exaggeration exerted the strongest direct effect on consumer harm. The three cognitive mediators—perceived advertising credibility, risk assessment distortion, and purchase decision pressure—all demonstrated significant partial mediation, with risk assessment distortion emerging as the most powerful indirect pathway. All four consumer vulnerability dimensions—digital literacy level, demographic vulnerability, prior victimization experience, and impulsive buying tendency—significantly moderated the falsity–harm relationship, with low-digital-literacy consumers experiencing approximately 1.7 times the adverse effect of high-literacy counterparts. Moderated mediation analysis revealed that the conditional indirect effect for the high-vulnerability group was approximately 2.3 times that of the low-vulnerability group, confirming that the cognitive harm mechanism intensifies systematically for vulnerable consumers. These findings advance consumer vulnerability theory in the digital context and offer evidence-based implications for consumer protection policy, platform governance, and digital literacy education.

We empirically examine the redistributive effects of higher minimum quality standards on consumer welfare. More specifically, we study the impact of the European Union's ban on battery eggs, the previous minimum quality standard, on household egg purchases and evaluate its redistributive effect on consumer welfare. This paper estimates an individual-level demand model for eggs differentiated by animal welfare. Typically, after minimum quality standards for eggs are raised, the price of higher-quality eggs falls. As a result, consumer welfare is redistributed from households that do not value animal welfare to households that are willing to pay a premium for animal welfare. In our analysis of German household data, we find that, on average, households with higher income are willing to pay more for eggs that provide higher animal welfare. This provides evidence that higher minimum quality standards have a regressive impact. In counterfactual scenarios, we estimate the cost reduction that would be needed to offset the regressive effect and find that as retailers’ pricing power increases, the cost reduction must be higher. Finally, we consider hypothetical future scenarios that continue to increase the minimum quality standard until only the highest-quality eggs remain on the market.

Product-harm crises (recalls) carry negative product information that adversely affects brand preference and advertising effectiveness. This negative impact of product-harm crises may differ across recall events depending on media coverage of the event, crisis severity, and consumers’ prior beliefs about product quality. We develop a state space model to capture the dynamics in brand preference, advertising effectiveness, and consumer response to product recalls; integrate it with a random coefficient demand model; and estimate it using a unique data set containing 35 automobile brands, 193 auto sub-brands, and 359 recalls during 1997–2002. Our results reveal that consumers respond more negatively to product recalls with greater media attention, more severe consequences, and higher perceived product quality. Furthermore, they show that sub-brand advertising effectiveness declines by a greater amount than parent-brand advertising and the decline in effectiveness of the recalled sub-brand’s advertising spills over to other sub-brands under the same parent brand. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.

Consumers perceive brands on their intended goals that can benefit or harm consumers. These warmth perceptions become consequential when a consumer experiences a product-harm incident. Conventional wisdom suggests that brand warmth may inhibit consumers from reporting such incidents to the brand and/or regulators. However, the authors’ analyses of field data show that brand warmth increases the number of reports of harm incidents. Yet consumers’ underlying motive is to provide feedback rather than complain. Indeed, using machine learning and regressions, and laboratory experiments, the authors demonstrate that brand warmth boosts the proportion of feedback (vs. complaint) reports. Next, they theorize and show that brand warmth induces consumer benevolence, which drives the consumer toward feedback (vs. complaint). Lastly, the authors demonstrate that if managers of a warm brand acknowledge the consumer’s feedback motive in their recovery messages, such acknowledgement enhances consumer satisfaction. The research extends the discipline’s knowledge on how a brand’s warmth perceptions impact consumers’ responses in the aftermath of a product-harm incident and what intervention managers can use in such a context.

Consumers spontaneously construct attributions for negative events such as product-harm crises. Base-rate information influences these attributions. The research findings suggest that for brands with positive prior beliefs, a high (vs. low) base rate of product-harm crises leads to less blame if the crisis is said to be similar to others in the industry (referred to as the \"discounting effect\"). However, in the absence of similarity information, a low (vs. high) base rate of crises leads to less blame toward the brand (referred to as the \"subtyping effect\"). For brands with negative prior beliefs, the extent of blame attributed to the brand is unaffected by the base-rate and similarity information. Importantly, the same base-rate information may have a different effect on the attribution of a subsequent crisis depending on whether discounting or subtyping occurred in the attribution of the first crisis. Consumers who discount a first crisis also tend to discount a second crisis for the same brand, whereas consumers who subtype a first crisis are unlikely to subtype again.

Online chatter is important because it is spontaneous, passionate, information rich, granular, and live. Thus, it can forewarn and be diagnostic about potential problems with automobile models, known as nameplates. The authors define \"perverse halo\" (or negative spillover) as the phenomenon whereby negative chatter about one nameplate increases negative chatter for another nameplate. The authors test the existence of such a perverse halo for 48 nameplates from four different brands during a series of automobile recalls. The analysis is by individual and panel vector autoregressive models. The study finds that perverse halo is extensive. It occurs for nameplates within the same brand across segments and across brands within segments. It is strongest between brands of the same country. Perverse halo is asymmetric, being stronger from a dominant brand to a less dominant brand than vice versa. Apology advertising about recalls has harmful effects on both the recalled brand and its rivals. Furthermore, these halo effects affect downstream performance metrics such as sales and stock market performance. Online chatter amplifies the negative effect of recalls on downstream sales by about 4.5 times.

When product recalls occur, companies provide corrective or compensation measures to consumers for the defective products they have purchased. These remedies directly affect consumers and the effectiveness of recall. This article examines the determinants of remedy choices with a theoretical framework rooted in the basic trade-off between remedy cost and consumer harm. In addition to recall and company characteristics, the authors also consider the impact of the CEO's personal incentives. Using recalls issued by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the authors find that companies prefer to avoid full remedy when remedy cost is high, yet they are more likely to provide full remedy for more severe product hazards. The results show that CEOs' personal interests interfere with remedy decisions: full remedy is less likely when the CEO receives greater cash compensation or less equity incentive, and when the CEO has longer tenure in the position. Importantly, the CEO's financial interests further moderate the effects of remedy cost and consumer harm. The findings have important implications for recall strategy, consumer welfare, public policy, and leadership ethics.

Minimal research has been published about inducements for sports and race betting, despite their ready availability and aggressive advertising. This paper aimed to document the range and structural features of these inducements, and analyse their alignment with the harm minimisation and consumer protection goals of responsible gambling. A scan of all inducements offered on the websites of 30 major race and sports betting brands located 223 separate inducements which we categorised into 15 generic types, all offering financial incentives to purchase. These comprised sign-up offers, refer-a-friend offers, happy hours, mobile betting bonuses, multi-bet offers, refund/stake-back offers, matching stakes/deposits, winnings paid for ‘close calls’, bonus or better odds, bonus or better winnings, competitions, reduced commission, free bets to selected punters, cash rebates and other free bets. All inducements were subject to numerous terms and conditions which were complex, difficult to find, and obscured by legalistic language. Play-through conditions of bonus bets were particularly difficult to interpret and failed basic requirements for informed choice. Website advertisements for inducements were prominently promoted but few contained a responsible gambling message. The results were analysed to generate 12 research propositions considered worthy of empirical research to inform much needed regulatory reform in this area.

Product-harm crises are omnipresent in today's marketplace. Such crises can cause major revenue and market-share losses, lead to costly product recalls, and destroy carefully nurtured brand equity. Moreover, some of these effects may spill over to nonaffected competitors in the category when they are perceived to be guilty by association. The extant literature lacks generalizable knowledge on the effectiveness of different marketing adjustments that managers often consider to mitigate the consequences of such events. To fill this gap, the authors use large household-scanner panels to analyze 60 fast-moving consumer good product crises that occurred in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and resulted in the full recall of an entire variety. The authors assess the effects of postcrisis advertising and price adjustments on the change in consumers' brand share and category purchases. In addition, they consider the extent to which the effects are moderated by two key crisis characteristics: the extent of negative publicity surrounding the event and whether the affected brand had to publicly acknowledge blame. Using the empirical findings, the authors provide context-specific managerial recommendations on how to overcome a product-harm crisis.

Reducing the alcoholic strength in beverages as a strategy to reduce harmful alcohol use has been proposed by multilateral institutions such as the World Health Organization and governments worldwide. Different industrial and artisanal techniques are used to achieve low-alcohol content beverages. Therefore, regulations regarding the content of alcohol in beverages and strategies to monitor compliance are important, because they are the main reason for classification of the beverages and are central to their categorization and market labelling. Furthermore, analytical techniques with adequate sensitivity as low as 0.04% vol are necessary to determine the alcohol ranges necessary for classification. In this narrative review, the definitions of no and low (NoLo) alcohol products are described and the differences in the legal definitions of these products in several regions of the world are highlighted. Currently, there is clearly confusion regarding the terminology of “no”, “free”, “zero”, “low”, “light”, or “reduced” alcohol products. There is an urgent need for global harmonization (e.g., at the Codex Alimentarius level) of the definitions from a commercial perspective and also to have common nomenclature for science and for consumer information.