Under one understanding of marketing, this discipline focuses on the creation of customer value. Although nobody doubts today that value is subjective and it emerges from consumer judgment, the causality is less clear. Do producers bring about value, or do consumers receive ‘raw’ products that only attain value in their estimation? Or, do producers and consumers co-create value as much of contemporary marketing theory assumes? Recent works on value creation, the building of customer relationships, and the service-dominant logic are related (...) to insights derived from both Austrian schools of value theory. The emphasis on value as a ratio between perceived benefits and perceived costs may be seen as a continuation of Menger’s and Wieser’s work. The focus on relations as a category distinct from goods goes back to Böhm-Bawerk. And the service-dominant logic reflects insights developed both by Menger and by philosophers of the Brentano School. The direct influence of Austrian economics on business studies is small and is restricted to very few scholars. But the potential is great for a fruitful development of current approaches in marketing by drawing on insights from Austrian economics and, perhaps even more so, from Austrian philosophy. This paper defines the relations between the thought from economists and philosophers and presents examples for how cutting-edge marketing thinking may profit from both Austrian schools of value. (shrink)

Bernard Williams's motivational reasons-internalism fails to capture our first-order reasons judgements, while Derek Parfit's nonnaturalistic reasons-externalism cannot explain the nature or normative authority of reasons. This paper offers an intermediary view, reformulating scepticism about external reasons as the claim not that they don't exist but rather that they don't matter. The end-relational theory of normative reasons is proposed, according to which a reason for an action is a fact that explains why the action would be good relative to some end, (...) where the relevant end for any ascription of reasons is determined by the speaker's conversational context. Because these ends need not be the agent's ends, Williams is wrong to reject the existence of external reasons. But contra Parfit, a reason for action is only important for an agent if it is motivationally internal to that agent. (shrink)

Preferences play a role in well-being that is difficult to escape, but whatever authority one grants to preferences, their malleability seems to cause problems for any theory of well-being that employs them. Most importantly, preferences appear to display a status-quo bias: people come to prefer what they are likely rather than unlikely to get. I try to do two things here. The first is to provide a more precise characterization of the status-quo bias, how it functions, and how it infects (...) commonly accepted theories of well-being. The second is to give an alternative characterization of an agent's preferences that succeeds in avoiding the status-quo bias. (shrink)

In his classical paper C. Wright Mills suggests a novel view of the motives within the framework of sociology of knowledge. Contrasting an approach of sociology of knowledge to subjectivistic understanding of the motives as outer manifestation of the inner elements, Mills locates a particular types of action within typical frames of normative actions and socially situated clusters of motive. Motives is something that is imputed and avowed by actors, therefore it is necessary to consider, first, how different motives are (...) assigned by different actors to themselves and others in certain social and historical situations, and second, how different vocabularies of motive conflict with each other and replace each other over time. In this case motives are not a manifestations of some inner impulses but a justifications of the behavior. (shrink)