Consumer Behavior Analysis and the Marketing Firm: Bilateral Contingency in the Context of Environmental Concern

摘要

Consumer behavior analysis provides an operant understanding of consumption as the result of the scope of the consumer behavior setting and the pattern of reinforcement that maintains it. The theory of the marketing firm shows how organizations respond to consumer behavior by managing the consumer behavior setting scope and pattern of reinforcement. Environment-impacting consumption and corporate attempts to reverse its impact can therefore be understood in operant terms. The question remains how we can understand the relationship between a complex contextual system like a firm, the behavior of which is predictable and controllable by considering its emergent operant consequences, and the collective behaviors of consumers, each of whom is a contextual system responding uniquely to the peculiar pattern of contingencies that shapes and maintains its behavior. This article seeks the solution in terms of bilateral contingencies and seeks to relate these to issues arising from the theory of metacontingency and macrobehavior.