Children’s Snacks, their Ads and Consumer Sovereignty

Stefan Mann (), Maurício Reinert, Grace Botelho Pain and Marcio Noveli

Forum for Social Economics, 2019, vol. 48, issue 3, 264-280

Abstract: The concept of sovereign consumer preferences is challenged from three sides: child consumers, unhealthy food and advertising. The two theoretical concepts of merit goods and libertarian paternalism are implemented in order to classify situations in which full consumer sovereignty does not apply. An empirical analysis of ads for children’s snacks reveals the libertarian paternalist perspective as helpful for understanding the demand for and justification of ‘soft’ governmental intervention in the case of the advertised snacks, whilst the ads for these snacks may well be demerit goods. The banning or heavy taxation of these ads is therefore advocated.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/07360932.2016.1196595 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:fosoec:v:48:y:2019:i:3:p:264-280

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFSE20

DOI: 10.1080/07360932.2016.1196595

Access Statistics for this article

Forum for Social Economics is currently edited by William Milberg, Dr Wolfram Elsner, Philip O'Hara, Cecilia Winters and Paolo Ramazzotti

More articles in Forum for Social Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().