When Profit Equals Price: Consumer Confusion about Donation Amounts in Cause-Related Marketing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A series of five studies examine potential consumer confusion associated with the “percentage of profit” wording often used to describe cause-related marketing in which money is donated to a charity each time a consumer makes a purchase. The initial four studies demonstrate that (1) expressing the donation amount as a percentage of profit leads to widespread confusion and near universal overestimation of the amount being donated, (2) even consumers who have had formal accounting training are susceptible to this bias, (3) participant motivation in an experimental setting cannot account for these results, and (4) people report higher attitudes toward a company and express stronger purchase intentions as a function of the percentage value of the donation but not as a function of whether it is a percentage of profit or price. The authors conclude with a study that explores several potential affirmative disclosures for the percentage-of-profit problem.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.047 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it