Risk Attitudes in the Supply Chain, Proxy Attributes, and Consumption

This dissertation studies risk in three domains: supply chain risk, communication of risk, and consumption risk with implied social risk. The first part of this dissertation examines how a retailer who exhibits risk attitudes would behave when engaging in a contract with its manufacturer to mitigate risk. The second part studies whether people exhibit the same risk attitudes when presented with information about the means objective and the fundamental objective. Furthermore, we test whether people are able to process and apply information about a nonlinear relationship between a means objective and a fundamental objective correctly. The final part of this dissertation studies how people respond to popular items and to understand whether consumers tend to head towards or away from the "popular" items. This last part seeks to decrease a customer's tendency to defer a purchasing decision to a later date.