ABSTRACT
A major barrier to transitions to environmental sustainability is that consumers lack information about the full environmental footprints of their purchases. Sellers' incentives do not support reducing the footprints unless customers have such information and are willing to act on it. We explore the potential of modern information technology to lower this barrier by enabling firms to inform customers of products' environmental footprints at the point of purchase and easily offset consumers' contributions through bundled purchases of carbon offsets. Using online stated choice experiments, we evaluated the effectiveness of several inexpensive features that firms in four industries could implement with existing online user interfaces for consumers. These examples illustrate the potential for firms to lower their overall carbon footprints while improving customer satisfaction by lowering the "soft costs" to consumers of proenvironmental choices. Opportunities such as these likely exist wherever firms possess environmentally relevant data not accessible to consumers or when transaction costs make proenvironmental action difficult.
Subject(s)
Carbon Footprint/economics , Commerce/economics , Consumer Behavior/economics , Ethics, Business , Choice Behavior , Commerce/ethics , Humans , Online Systems/economics , Online Systems/ethicsABSTRACT
Health-related research is increasingly drawing on novel sources of online data, such as crowdsourced information about disease outbreaks, consumer-supplied information provided to health or wellness Web sites, Internet search queries about personal health, and social network postings that identify health behaviors. We offer examples of online sources and their uses, identify ethical and policy issues they generate, and formulate key questions for future discussion and investigation. Further work in this area will require cross-disciplinary collaboration to develop ethics and policy guidance for the ethical use of these novel data sources in health-related research.
Subject(s)
Biomedical Research/ethics , Online Systems/ethics , Biomedical Research/methods , Cooperative Behavior , Health Information Systems , Humans , Internet , Public PolicyABSTRACT
The paper outlines the advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet to collect data concerning both online and offline gamers. Drawing from experience of a number of studies carried out online by the authors and by reviewing the available literature, the authors discuss the main issues concerning data collected from video game players. The paper examines a number of areas, including recruiting and utilizing participants, validity, suitable methods of data collection (i.e., questionnaire studies, online tests, participant observation, online interviews), and ethical issues. It is concluded that online research methods can be a useful way of examining the psychosocial aspects of video game playing.
