Date of Award

6-2012

Document Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Yufei Ren

Language

English

Keywords

counterfeit goods, consumer, goods, purchase intent

Abstract

The market for counterfeit luxury goods has been growing exponentially over the past several years, causing the luxury brand market to lose approximately $12 billion per year (International Chamber of Commerce 2004). In the United States, over 750,000 jobs are lost annually due to counterfeiting (US Chamber of Commerce 2006). This study hypothesizes that consumers with Social-Adjustive attitudes have a higher preference towards logos and will be generally indifferent towards authenticity, while Value-Expressive consumers prefer higher quality bags and are generally indifferent towards the presence of logos. Consumers’ degree of preference towards their respective variable (quality or logo) is slightly different in each control situation (i.e. logo is more important to Social-Adjustive consumers when bags are counterfeit as opposed to authentic). This paper examines the purchase intent for handbags varying by either logo or authenticity. The independent variables used to measure purchase intent (dependent variable) are consumers’ attitudes towards counterfeits and luxury goods: Value-Expressive and Social-Adjustive. Using survey data, 123 female Union College students are categorized by attitude. Responses from these categories determined the effects of attitudes on preferences. Purchase intent for four bag comparison questions (two per hypothesis) is measured using regression analysis. Attitude functions are regressed on purchase intent in different ways to measure their pure and joint effects of each attitude on purchase intent. My research expands on previous research by examining the effect of consumers’ attitudes on purchase intent when dealing with logo preference.

Download

Included in

Economics Commons

Share

COinS