Category: Consumer Behavior

Budding guitarists seek the magical powers of rock hero instruments, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"Like people from the Middle Ages who sought saints' relics, modern consumers like the budding rock guitarist desire fetishes (objects perceived as magical and possessing extraordinary power)" write authors Karen V. Fernandez (University of Aukland, New Zealand) and John L. Lastovicka (Arizona State University).

"We live in a world where anybody with a modest amount of money can buy a close copy or a replica of a desired object," the authors write. "We wanted to know why consumers who desired a particular rock star's instrument would settle for replicas of it; and how those copies became perceived as special, magical objects in their own right."

The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with sixteen men who owned more than one guitar and resided either in New Zealand or the United States. They found that many participants believed in the idea of "contagious magic" (the idea that two entities that touch can influence each other). For example, many fans want to have rock stars sign their instruments, and one established performer explained how he used another rock star's discarded guitar strings.

The research also revealed that replica guitars appeal to participants' belief in "imitative magic" (things that look alike are alike). "They often bought the best possible copy they could attain, and then if needed, made further changes to it so that it resembled the desired object even more closely," the authors explain. For example, some consumers switch out knobs on their guitars to more closely resemble the instruments of the artists they admired.

When players acquire new instruments, they play them often and become bonded with the objects. "A guitar then often becomes perceived as a player's confidant, companion, collaborator, wife, girlfriend, or muse," the authors write. And guitar players act out their fantasies by playing their guitars in private and in public.

"A fetish object does not guarantee a hit recording, a major league record, or a safe return home from battle," the authors write. "However, fetish objects increase confidence and reduce anxiety and hence increase performance."

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Journal Reference:

1. Karen V. Fernandez and John L. Lastovicka. Making Magic: Fetishes in Contemporary Consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, August 2011

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research sheds some light into why someone would pay $48,875 for a tape measure that had belonged to Jackie Kennedy or $3,300 for Bernie Madoff's footstool.

"Why do people pay money for celebrity possessions?" write authors George E. Newman (Yale University), Gil Diesendruck (Bar-Ilan University), and Paul Bloom (Yale University). "Celebrity items often have little functional value. And because the objects themselves tend to be relatively common artifacts (clothing, furniture, etc.) they are often physically indistinguishable from a number of seemingly identical products in the marketplace."

The authors researched potential explanations for the phenomenon, delving into the concept of "contagion," the belief that a person's immaterial qualities or essence can be transferred onto an object through physical contact. "We were curious to examine the degree to which contagion beliefs may account for the valuation of celebrity items," the authors explain.

In their first study, the authors asked participants how much they would like to own celebrity and non-celebrity possessions. They asked about well-regarded individuals (like George Clooney) or despised individuals (like Saddam Hussein). They measured the dimensions of contagion, perceived market value, and liking of the individual. "For well-liked celebrities, the primary explanation seemed to be contagion — participants expressed a desire to own some of the individual's actual physical remnants," the authors write. In contrast, when the items had belonged to a despised individual, people perceived that the items were potentially valuable to others, but contact with the hated individuals decreased the items' value.

In a second experiment, participants reported their willingness to purchase a sweater owned by someone famous (well-liked or despised). However, the sweater was "transformed" by sterilization or preventing its resale. For well-liked celebrities sterilizing reduced participants' willingness to purchase the sweater, while preventing the resale of the item had a comparably minimal effect. "In contrast, for despised individuals, the pattern was the opposite: removing contact only increased the sweater's value while preventing the sale to others significantly reduced participants' willingness to purchase it," the authors conclude.

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Journal Reference:

1. George E. Newman, Gil Diesendruck, and Paul Bloom. Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects. Journal of Consumer Research, August 2011

People make purchasing decisions by choosing between alternatives or by rejecting certain options. But a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research finds that focusing on ruling out an option can lead consumers to reverse their preferences.

"Consider the decision to purchase an iPhone or a Blackberry," write authors Juliano Laran (University of Miami) and Keith Wilcox (Babson College). "If a consumer prefers a business phone, a choice task would lead her to purchase a Blackberry. In this research we demonstrate that rejecting alternatives makes consumers more likely to select preference-inconsistent options. Thus, if a consumer prefers a business phone, a rejection task would lead her to purchase an iPhone."

Why does this happen? When consumers reject alternatives, they need to decide which alternative they do not want, so they focus on options that are less preferred in order to assess if they should reject those options. This shift of focus makes them more likely to notice appealing features.

"Such situations are very common in marketing. Consumers may want a nice apartment but still want to save money; they may want a fast car but still care about safety; they may want healthy food, but still desire tasty food," the authors write. Along that line, even though a consumer may prefer a business phone, she is more likely to purchase the iPhone when she "rejects" it because the process of rejecting increases her focus on the appealing nonbusiness features of the iPhone.

In one study, participants who said they would prefer an apartment closer to nightlife to a less-expensive one further from nightlife were told to select an apartment to "reject." "Simply instructing them to decide which one they would like to 'reject' makes them more likely to choose the less-expensive apartment," the authors write. And when they were primed to prefer the less-expensive apartment, participants selected the apartment closer to nightlife.

"Regardless of whether participants prefer the apartment closer to nightlife or the less-expensive apartment when they choose, having them reject reverses preference," the authors explain.

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Journal Reference:

1. Juliano Laran and Keith Wilcox. Choice, Rejection, and Elaboration on Preference-Inconsistent Alternatives. Journal of Consumer Research, February 1, 2011

 Women prefer female service providers in situations where they might fall prey to stereotypes about their math and science abilities, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"One of the most widely held stereotypes in North America is that women's competence and aptitude in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) domains is less than men's," write authors Kyoungmi Lee (Yonsei University, Korea), Hakkyun Kim (Concordia University, Canada), and Kathleen Vohs (University of Minnesota).

In their study, the authors demonstrate that stereotypes about women's STEM abilities shape women's consumer behavior. In particular, women shun situations in which they fear they will be the brunt of the stereotype, especially those that involve male service providers in transactions that call for STEM abilities.

For example, when women want advice on investments or on buying a car they may wonder if they will receive unfair treatment or become an easy target for manipulation. The authors demonstrated that female consumers who are reminded of their gender identity expressed lower intentions to purchase service from firms that advertised themselves with male service providers. This pattern occurred for a tax firm that touted its service with male investment advisors and also in automobile repair and purchases.

"When the threat of being stereotyped is in the air, consumers become anxious when they contemplate transacting with outgroup vs. ingroup service providers if they are reminded of the negative gender stereotype in the STEM domains," the authors write. "A rise in consumer anxiety, in turn, is the very driving force behind women's disinterest in transacting with male service providers or salespersons."

The research also led to an interesting way to reduce the anxiety related to the stereotype: vanilla scent. "In a vanilla-scented environment, the effect of possibly being stereotyped seemingly does not alter female consumers' intentions to transact with firms, even when the firms promoted themselves using male salespersons," the authors write.

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Journal Reference:

1. Kyoungmi Lee, Hakkyun Kim, and Kathleen Vohs. Stereotypes Threat in the Marketplace: Consumer Anxiety and Purchase Intentions. Journal of Consumer Research, August 2011

Government regulators could more realistically assess the value of improving food safety if they considered the fact that consumers typically want to avoid getting sick — even if it means they have to pay a little extra for safer food, researchers say.

In the world of food regulation, cost-benefit analyses are a primary tool for assessing the societal benefits of mandating more stringent — and more expensive — processing practices. In most cases, regulators determine a dollar value associated with pursuing new rules by estimating how many illnesses and deaths the safer processing would prevent.

But a recent study proposes a new way to approach these estimates. Instead of focusing on reducing food-borne illnesses and deaths associated with a specific pathogen, why not ask consumers how valuable food-safety improvements are to them? The researchers conducted such a national survey that they designed with the help of an economic model that predicts consumer behavior.

The results suggested that Americans would be willing to pay about a dollar per person each year, or an estimated $305 million in the aggregate, for a 10 percent reduction in the likelihood that hamburger they buy in the supermarket is contaminated by E. coli, said Brian Roe, professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at Ohio State University and co-author of the study.

By comparison, a 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis estimated the value of eradicating a specific type of E. coli contamination from all food sources would result in a benefit valued at $446 million.

The problem with the federal estimate, Roe says, is that total eradication of the most common causes of food-borne illness is virtually impossible because of the exorbitant cost required to achieve such a goal. And, he added, the more flexible method of measurement proposed in this study suggests that consumers are willing to pay more than expected for an outcome that offers much less than total eradication of pathogens.

"We think what we are measuring is more realistic, as complete eradication is a highly unlikely outcome for any policy," Roe said. "We also are quite certain that our estimates of consumers' willingness to pay would be higher than what the USDA would calculate using its cost-of-illness approach."

Roe conducted the study with Mario Teisl of the University of Maine. The research is published in a recent issue of the journal Food Policy.

The researchers say their proposed method takes into account important variables that the average cost-benefit analysis doesn't measure, such as pain, suffering and worry, as well as food-borne illness that doesn't do any economic damage to an individual — their example is a case of food poisoning on a Friday night that resolves before the work week begins. Their estimate also accounts for human behavior: Some consumers will opt not to eat what they buy, will overcook it to ensure they kill any pathogens, or simply do not get sick even when they eat bad food.

In contrast, current methods of cost-benefit analysis involve translating an improvement in food safety into numbers: specifically, reductions in deaths and illnesses linked to a pathogen. Costs factored into the assessment might include a co-pay for a visit to the doctor and lost wages, as well as the economic costs associated with death — say, the projected income not earned when a life is cut short.

For example, to reach its $446 million estimate to eradicate E. coli cases that produce Shiga toxin and can lead to kidney damage, the USDA took the 73,480 cases of contamination that occur each year and assigned a formula-derived dollar amount to those cases to arrive at the benefit figure.

"The projections will estimate how many fewer people will die, how many fewer will get sick, and how do we assign benefit values to those improvements in the human condition," Roe said. "What we're saying is, let's think of a method where we can assign a value to that avoided case as well as one for a person who misses work and pays $20 to go to a doctor.

"To hedge their bets, would people be willing to pay $2 a year, $5 a year, to limit the odds they're going to get sick from 1 in 100 down to 1 in 1,000? That's the data you really want."

Roe and Teisl analyzed surveys from 3,511 individuals. In the questionnaire, they set up six hypothetical scenarios around the purchase of either a package of hotdogs or a pound of hamburger. They set prices for the packages — both "status quo" foods and those treated with either ethylene gas processing or electron beam irradiation to reduce contaminants — and then laid out a variety of probabilities that the treated or untreated food packages contained contamination with either E. coli or listeria, another pathogen that can cause food-borne illness.

They followed by asking respondents to choose one of three actions: buy the food treated with the pathogen-reducing technology, buy their usual brand, or stop buying this product altogether.

The results showed that consumers will reach a limit to how much they want to pay to reduce their chances of getting sick. If the treated product cost only 10 cents more than an untreated package, about 60 percent of respondents said they'd buy the improved product. But when that higher price reached $1.60 more per package, less than a third would opt for the treated product.

The structure of the survey also allowed researchers to see the influence of human behavior and opinions on likely illness outcomes.

"A lot of other research is about what goes into your mouth. But you have a lot of leeway between when you pick food up in a store and when you decide whether you're going to take a bite," Roe said. "What we're saying is this is not just about people who got sick, it's about everyone who could become sick and is worried about that and is willing to shell out a few more pennies per package to avoid that."

Among the hypothetical scenarios offered in the survey, aggregate figures for consumer willingness to pay ranged from $40 million for a 10 percent reduction of the likely presence of listeria pathogens in hotdogs to the $305 million for the 10 percent reduction in the likelihood of E. coli contamination in hamburger.

Roe noted, though, that these specific numbers are less important than the method used to reach them. He said the model used in this research to construct the hypothetical scenarios could be customized for a variety of different regulatory questions.

"If the food industry were forced to put technology in place that lowered the presence of E. coli and that ramped up prices to the extent where everybody had to pay about a dollar more out of pocket each year for hamburger, we're saying that, according to this model, that would be about an equal tradeoff for the U.S. population. And if the technology costs only about 10 cents per person instead, that would seem like a good deal to most people," he said.

"If regulators could become more comfortable with this measurement process, agencies might change the way they conduct their cost-benefit analysis. And that would be an interest of ours, to see if our work and others' work in this area will eventually change the way people attack these questions."

This research was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the University of Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station; the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center; and the Marvin and June Morrison Chair in Agribusiness at Arizona State University.

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Journal Reference:

1. Mario F. Teisl, Brian E. Roe. Consumer willingness-to-pay to reduce the probability of retail foodborne pathogen contamination. Food Policy, 2010; 35 (6): 521 DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2010.07.003

 — When the FDA proposed new rules restricting outdoor tobacco advertising near schools and playgrounds in 2009, the tobacco industry argued that such rules would lead to a near complete ban on tobacco advertising in urban areas. An article in the March 2011 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine shows that the effect of these rules would be less severe than the industry contends.

"It is critical to point out one subtle, but important difference between the analysis that the tobacco industry conducted and the analysis presented here," commented lead investigator Douglas A. Luke, PhD, Professor, Center for Tobacco Policy Research, Washington University, St. Louis. "Their analyses focused on the percentage of land area off-limits to tobacco advertising. In this study the number and proportion of retailers affected were calculated, not the land percentage. The number of retailers affected, not the land area is the more appropriate metric to use when making policy decisions. First, the 'real-world' regulatory impact is felt by people and businesses, not by land. Second, tobacco retailers are clustered in commercial zones and showing that a high percentage of all land is unavailable for advertising under outdoor advertising bans overstates the impact of the policy. A key question is not what percentage of land is off-limits under an advertising ban, but rather, what is the additional or incremental impact of an advertising ban given existing zoning regulations."

Using geographical information system (GIS) spatial analysis for the states of Missouri and New York, along with more detailed analyses of the urban areas of St. Louis and New York City, investigators located all tobacco retailers falling with 350-, 500-, and 1000-foot buffer zones around all schools and playgrounds. They determined that 22% of retailers in Missouri and 51% in New York fall within 1,000-foot buffers around schools. In urban settings, more retailers are affected, 29% in St. Louis and 79% in New York City. Sensitivity analyses demonstrate that smaller buffers decrease the proportion of affected retailers. 350-foot buffers affect only 6.7% of retailers in St. Louis and 29% in New York City.

Therefore, in Missouri and New York, outdoor tobacco advertising would still be permitted in many locations even if such advertising was prohibited in a 1,000-foot buffer zone around schools and playgrounds. Much smaller buffer zones of 350 feet may result in almost no reduction of outdoor advertising in many parts of the country. The FDA is still deciding the distance from schools where they will ban outdoor tobacco advertising. Given the lack of impact of a 350-foot ban, the authors urge the FDA to reject that as an option and implement a distance that is more effective at reducing outdoor advertising where children will routinely be exposed to it. If the 1,000-foot buffer zone were implemented, the authors estimate that up to 1.5 million pieces of outdoor tobacco advertising would be removed across the country.

Buffer zones where no outdoor advertisements are allowed have been proposed by the FDA and public comment has been solicited. The tobacco industry contends that a 1000-foot buffer zone in urban areas would be equivalent to a total ban and therefore unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

The study concludes that "Tobacco advertising reaches children and adolescents in a variety of ways. Given the effectiveness of tobacco advertising, efforts to restrict the exposure of young people to tobacco advertising is an important health policy goal. The current health policy analyses suggest that weakening of outdoor advertising policies may result in phantom policies that do little to reduce youth exposure to tobacco product advertising."

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Journal Reference:

1. Douglas A. Luke, Kurt M. Ribisl,Carson Smith and Amy A. Sorg. Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act: Banning Outdoor Tobacco Advertising Near Schools and Playgrounds. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 40, Issue 3 (March 2011) DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2010.11.018

 Red Bull's red and gold logo can "give you wings" — for better or worse — even if consumers don't know it, according to a new study by two Boston College professors, who found the brand's edgy marketing efforts have sold a heavy dose of attitude to consumers.

Researchers put subjects at the controls of a car racing video game, supplying each with functionally identical racecars, but each car decorated with a different brand logo and color scheme.

Players put in control of the Red Bull car displayed the characteristics often attributed to the brand — like speed, power, aggressiveness and risk-taking — and the results were both positive and negative, professors S. Adam Brasel and James Gips of the Boston College Carroll School of Management report in the current edition of the Journal of Consumer Psychology. In some cases, the drivers sped around the game course. In others, their recklessness caused them to crash in the game and lose valuable time.

"In a performance context, what we see is that people racing the Red Bull car race faster and more aggressively, sometimes recklessly, and they either do very, very well or they push themselves too far and crash," said Brasel, an assistant professor of marketing. "They tend to do great or they tend to do horrible. There's very little middle ground."

All this took place without the consumers being aware of their own behavior, said Brasel. These changes are a result of "non-conscious brand priming," according to Brasel and Gips, Egan Professor of Computer Science and chairman of the Carroll School's Information Systems Department. It appears that the personality of a brand can non-consciously "push" or "nudge" a consumer to act in ways consistent with that personality when exposed to brand imagery. The study shows that this priming affect can extend beyond how we think into areas of actual consumer performance, with both positive and negative consequences.

In a world where ambient advertising swaddles buses in wrap-around billboards and product placements in TV, movies, Internet, videogames and other media topped $3.6 billion last year, the Red Bull effect shows advertising and marketing programs can push beyond simply making a sale. They can have a behavioral influence that consumers don't expect.

Red Bull has built their brand identity by sponsoring promotions such as street luge contests, airplane races, and a full-contact ice-skating obstacle course known as "Crashed Ice." At the website brandtags.net, where users enter words or phrases they associate with brands, words like "speed" "power" "risk-taking" and "recklessness" occur ten times more frequently for RedBull than the other 14 most common drink brands.

So while the research subjects knew the cars were identical in performance and differed only in paint jobs — also representing prominent brands Guinness, Tropicana, and Coca Cola — Red Bull's brand identity of speed, power, and recklessness worked both for and against the players.

"This highlights some unintended consequences of ambient advertising and product placement," said Brasel. "It's an effect that we as advertisers have not been aware of or have been ignoring. All of these brands that surround us are probably having a greater effect on our behavior than most of us realize."

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Journal Reference:

1. S. Adam Brasel, James Gips. Red Bull 'Gives You Wings' for better or worse: A double-edged impact of brand exposure on consumer performance. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.jcps.2010.09.008

— University of Pittsburgh researchers have recorded neuron activity in adolescent rat brains that could reveal the biological root of the teenage propensity to consider rewards over consequences and explain why adolescents are more vulnerable to drug addiction, behavioral disorders, and other psychological ills.

The team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience that electrode recordings of adult and adolescent brain-cell activity during the performance of a reward-driven task show that adolescent brains react to rewards with far greater excitement than adult brains. This frenzy of stimulation occurred with varying intensity throughout the study along with a greater degree of disorganization in adolescent brains. The brains of adult rats, on the other hand, processed their prizes with a consistent balance of excitation and inhibition.

The extreme difference in brain activity provides a possible physiological explanation as to why teenagers are more prone than adults to rash behavior, addiction, and mental diseases, said lead researcher Bita Moghaddam, a professor of neuroscience in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences. She and coauthor David Sturman, a Pitt neuroscience doctoral student, observed the disparate reactions to reward in individual neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region that weighs payoff and punishment to plan and make decisions.

"The disorganized and excess excitatory activity we saw in this part of the brain means that reward and other stimuli are processed differently by adolescents," Moghaddam said. "This could intensify the effect of reward on decision making and answer several questions regarding adolescent behavior, from their greater susceptibility to substance abuse to their more extreme reactions to pleasurable and upsetting experiences."

In addition, malfunctions in the orbitofrontal cortex have been observed in cases of schizophrenia, mood disorders, and other psychological disturbances, Moghaddam said. The type of erratic activity in the cortex that she and Sturman observed could aggravate these conditions at a time when the maturing brain is vulnerable.

"The symptoms of these illnesses generally begin to appear during adolescence," Moghaddam said. "Adolescence is a period of behavioral and psychiatric vulnerabilities, so the disorganized brain activity and excess excitation could push a brain already predisposed to mental disorders too far, triggering the onset of symptoms."

The study is the first to record and compare individual neuron activity in adult and adolescent brains during the performance of a task. Moghaddam and Sturman presented adult and adolescent rats — which exhibit behavioral and biological similarities to adult and teenage humans — with three holes to poke their noses through; the rats each received a sugar pellet when they chose the center hole.

Brain activity in the adolescents was similar to that of the adults most of the time but striking differences arose when the younger rats retrieved rewards. As each of the adult rats collected a sugar pellet, the orbitofrontal cortex neurons showed the normal increase in both excitation and inhibition, with consistent levels of each impulse throughout the study.

Adolescents, on the other hand, exhibited surges of excitation that ranged from twice to four times the levels in adults. At the same time, the inhibitory impulses in the adolescents' brains barely changed from the low levels they experienced before receiving the sugar pellet.

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Journal Reference:

1. D. A. Sturman, B. Moghaddam. Reduced Neuronal Inhibition and Coordination of Adolescent Prefrontal Cortex during Motivated Behavior. Journal of Neuroscience, 2011; 31 (4): 1471 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4210-10.2011

A long-term study has found that children who scored lower on measures of self-control as young as age 3 were more likely to have health problems, substance dependence, financial troubles and a criminal record by the time they reached age 32.

Self-control in the more than 1,000 New Zealand children who participated in the study was assessed by teachers, parents, observers and the children themselves. It included measures like "low frustration tolerance, lacks persistence in reaching goals, difficulty sticking with a task, over-active, acts before thinking, has difficulty waiting turn, restless, not conscientious."

Fast-forward to adulthood, and the kids scoring lowest on those measures scored highest for things like breathing problems, gum disease, sexually transmitted disease, inflammation, overweight, and high cholesterol and blood pressure, according to an international research team led by Duke University psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi.

The impulsivity and relative inability to think about the long-term of the lower self-control individuals gave them more difficulty with finances, like savings, home ownership and credit card debt. They also were more likely to be single parents, have a criminal conviction record, and be dependent on alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and harder drugs.

"These adult outcomes were predictable across the entire spectrum of self-control scores, from low to high," Moffitt said.

Yet study participants who somehow found a way to improve their self-control as they aged fared better in adulthood than their childhood scores would have predicted. Self-control is something that can be taught, the researchers say, and doing so could save taxpayers a pile of money on health care, criminal justice and substance abuse problems down the road.

To further corroborate the importance of self-control, Caspi and Moffitt ran the same analysis on a sample of 500 pairs of fraternal twins in Britain and found that the sibling with lower self-control scores at age 5 was more likely than their sibling to begin smoking, perform poorly in school and engage in antisocial behaviors at age 12. "This shows that self-control is important by itself, apart from all other factors that siblings share, such as their parents and home life," Caspi said.

The New Zealand children with low-self control were more likely to make poor choices as adolescents, including taking up smoking, having unplanned pregnancies and dropping out of school. Naturally, this set them on a more difficult path. Even the low self-control individuals who finished high school as non-smokers without kids showed poorer outcomes at age 32.

And because of a greater likelihood of single-parent status and limited income, it's also apparent that "one generation's low self-control puts the next generation at a disadvantage as well," Moffitt said.

"The good news is that self-control can change. People can change," said Alexis Piquero, a professor of criminology at Florida State University who was not involved in the research.

Piquero, who studies the developmental roots of criminal behavior, said there are many time-tested approaches that give parents and teachers the tools to teach self-control. The successful programs practice decision-making, role-playing and learning the consequences of actions.

"Identifying low self-control as early as possible and doing prevention and intervention is so much cheaper" than dealing with prisons, drug programs and personal economic failures, Piquero said. "If you're just making a dollars-and-cents decision, it's a no-brainer."

The study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the UK Medical Research Council, New Zealand Health Research Council, Hebrew University, and the Jacobs Foundation. Co-authors on the work include researchers from King's College London and the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

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Journal Reference:

1. Terrie E. Moffitt, Louise Arseneault, Daniel Belsky, Nigel Dickson, Robert J. Hancox, Honalee Harrington, Renate Houts, Richie Poulton, Brent W. Roberts, Stephen Ross, Malcolm R. Sears, W. Murray Thomson, and Avshalom Caspi. A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1010076108

 When it comes to economic development in American cities, the trusted old theory "If you build it, they will come" may not work, a Michigan State University sociologist argues in a new study.

Conventional wisdom holds that job growth attracts people to urban areas.

But according to a study in the Journal of Urban Affairs, MSU's Zachary Neal found the opposite to be true. Bringing the people in first — specifically, airline passengers traveling on business — leads to a fairly significant increase in jobs, he said.

"The findings indicate that people come first, then the jobs," said Neal, assistant professor of sociology. "It's just the opposite of an 'If you build it, they will come' sort of an approach."

For the study, Neal examined the number of business air-travel passengers in major U.S. cities during a 15-year period (1993-2008). Business passengers destined for a city and not just passing through are a key to job growth, he said.

Attracting business travelers to the host city for meetings and other business activities by offering an easily accessible airport and other amenities such as hotels and conference centers is one of the best ways to create new jobs, Neal said. These business travelers bring with them new ideas and potential investment, which creates a positive climate for innovation and job growth. In the study, Neal analyzed all permanent nonfarm jobs.

Neal said the finding does not contradict more direct job-creation strategies, including the construction of office and retail spaces, which can often lead to new jobs in the area. He noted that such approaches are unlikely to attract business travelers and others to the area. Thus, the study clarifies the relationship between the two main ways cities can grow: by attracting new people and by attracting new jobs. Attracting new people to a city leads to job growth, but job growth does not attract new people, he said.

According to the study, municipalities with the greatest potential to convert business passengers into new jobs were largely "sunbelt" cities such as Phoenix, Miami, Dallas, Houston and Riverside, Calif. Those with the least potential were mostly East Coast or Midwestern cities such as Boston, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

Neal added that business airline traffic is far more important for a city's economic vitality than population size — a finding he established in an earlier study and reaffirmed with the current research.

"One might expect to see a bump up in jobs first, and then a year or two later an increase in business passenger traffic," Neal said. "But we saw just the opposite. There was a bump up in business traffic and then about a year later a bump up in jobs. The business passengers were coming before the jobs did, rather than after."

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Journal Reference:

1. Zachary P Neal. The Causal Relationship Between Employment and Business Networks in U.S. Cities. Journal of Urban Affairs, 2011; DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.2010.00538.x