People are vain yet morally motivated. This contradiction captures the psychological tension felt by consumers, often caught between social motives and morality norms, participating in counterfeit luxury consumption (CLC). Despite the extensive research on the social motives underpinning CLC, little is known about how consumer morality interplays with social motives. Based on the functional theories of attitudes, this research advances the current knowledge by unveiling the interaction between the social-adjustive function of consumer attitudes and consumer morality and its impact on (...) purchase intentions. By differentiating luxury products based on their public visibility—categorizing them as either social (high public visibility) or private (low public visibility)—this research reveals that consumers exhibit a preference for social over private counterfeit luxuries, driven by a more pronounced social-adjustive function in their attitudes. Notably, this research shows that consumer morality significantly attenuates purchase intentions for social counterfeit luxury through its impact on the social-adjustive function, whereas its effect on the intentions for private one is less prominent. Furthermore, by employing transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to manipulate consumer morality, the role of moral emotions is shown to influence consumer morality and subsequent behaviors. This research enriches our comprehension of morality’s role in affecting consumers’ social motives in the CLC context and suggests managers and regulators consider product type when applying moral education to counteract CLC. (shrink)

Merchants often use personalized pricing: they charge different consumers different prices for the same product. We assess the ethicality of personalized pricing by generalizing and extending an earlier model by Coker and Izaret (Journal of Business Ethics 173:387–398, 2021) who found that price personalization ethically outperforms unitary pricing. Using a simulation analysis, we show that these results crucially depend on the choice of parameters and do not hold universally. We further incorporate additional sources of marginal cost into the utility function (...) that will likely arise from personalized pricing. These include the expectation that personalized pricing is widely considered unfair by consumers who prefer that all consumers are charged the same price (unitary pricing), and that firms often approximate the consumers’ willingness-to-pay in ways that may raise negative sentiments among consumers who feel that their privacy is breached. By extending our model with disutility from unfairness perception and disutility from surveillance aversion, we demonstrate that personalized pricing is quickly outperformed by unitary pricing under social welfare functions that tend to prioritize total utility (utilitarianism and prioritarianism), whereas personalized pricing can ethically outperform unitary pricing under social welfare functions that tend to prioritize equality (egalitarianism and leximin). Our findings illustrate various intricacies and dynamics regarding the circumstances under which personalized pricing can be considered ethical. (shrink)

Linear temporal logic is a widely used method for verification of model checking and expressing the system specifications. The relationship between theory of automata and logic had a great influence in the computer science. Investigation of the relationship between quantum finite automata and linear temporal logic is a natural goal. In this paper, we present a construction of quantum finite automata on finite words from linear-time temporal logic formulas. Further, the relation between quantum finite automata and linear temporal logic is (...) explored in terms of language recognition and acceptance probability. We have shown that the class of languages accepted by quantum finite automata are definable in linear temporal logic, except for measure-once one-way quantum finite automata. (shrink)