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Call for Papers

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The Journal of Consumer Affairs announces a Special Issue on

"Enhancing Consumer Well-Being: Equity and Resilience"

Submission deadline: September 1 2025

Special issue editors:
Yilan Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Swarn Chatterjee, University of Georgia

Understanding equity and resilience in the consumer context is crucial for enhancing consumer well-being. Equity ensures fair distribution of resources, technologies, opportunities, and benefits among consumers. Resilience enables individuals to withstand economic and environmental challenges without significant well-being declines. This special issue aims to bring together interdisciplinary research to deepen our understanding of enhancing consumer well-being, focusing on equity and resilience. We invite exploration into the challenges and opportunities in promoting equity and resilience, addressing disparities, discrimination, and barriers to access, ensuring that all consumers have equal opportunities to thrive. We also invite examinations of consumers’ resilience amidst economic and environmental shocks, emphasizing the capacity to absorb, manage, and mitigate the impact of adverse events such as recessions and natural disasters while maintaining overall well-being. By doing so, this special issue aims to inform targeted interventions and regulatory frameworks to promote equity and resilience and promote consumer welfare and societal well-being.

The special issue welcomes submissions in topics including but not limited to:

  • Examining factors contributing to disparities and inequalities among consumers, including financial resources, income, education, ethnicity, gender, and geography.
  • Investigating barriers to access faced by marginalized or underrepresented consumer groups, including physical, economic, technological, and other obstacles.
  • Evaluating the differential impact of consumer policies on different consumer groups based on socioeconomic status, demographics, geography, and other factors.
  • Assessing the effectiveness of policies, consumer empowerment initiatives, or best practices designed to promote consumer inclusivity and diversity.
  • Examining consumers’ adaptation to environmental challenges, such as climate change, natural disasters, and resource depletion, to ensure their well-being.
  • Pandemic-influenced deviant and prosocial consumer behavior
  • Analyzing consumer resilience to economic fluctuations, recessions, financial crises, and health shocks.
  • Evaluating strategies for financial resilience, including promoting financial literacy, encouraging savings, and diversifying income sources.
  • Examining the role of resilience-building measures, such as social safety nets and community-based initiatives, in bolstering consumer resilience to economic and environmental shocks.

Timeline

Submission window: June 1 – September 1, 2025
Publication date expectation: Winter 2026

Note: ACCI’s 2025 Annual Conference: Enhancing Consumer Well-being: Equity and Resilience is April 15-17, 2025, with submissions due October 31, 2024 Extended to November 11, 2024.

Submission Criteria

We seek high quality quantitative and qualitative research that contribute to the understanding of consumer equity and resilience. The selection is based on JCA criteria for original manuscripts.

Full manuscripts to the Special Issue may be submitted online through Scholar One Manuscripts at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/joca. Style guidelines and publishing requirements can be viewed online at wileyonlinelibray.com/journal/JOCA.