Important elements in consumer's decision-making process

摘要

For many Romanian people material welfare is a basic motivation for their endeavour towards a good life as they represent it and want it. In Romania, throughout the period of transition, there has been a strong tendency towards social polarization. The economic inequalities also had a long term, systematic character. The economic divisions and poverty are, at first sight, purely economic phenomena. The market decides who is rich and who is poor, who will have the desired standard of life and who will experience material deprivation. A deeper analysis will reveal, however, that, at least in a poor country, as Romania, the division of society on poor people and rich people has genetic and functional connections with the social and political order. Why are the rich people rich and the poor people poor? Which is the "key" to accomplishment which the people seek and treasure? Whom are we to hold responsible for success or failure in getting the desired standard of life: the individual characters or the social contexts? How much of the variance (and hierarchy) of welfare is due to the individual characters and how much to the structural ones? Agent or structure? The chance the people have to live better depend both on the individual characteristics (options and motivation, resources and capacities, adequate representations of the social play rules), and on the social context in which they live.