Consumers make purchasing decisions every day, taking into account their needs, preferences and beliefs which may change due to various determinants; some depending on the consumers themselves and others on the organizations acting in the market. What determinants are inducing these changes in consumers` needs, perceptions, attitudes, values, and finally, purchasing behavior? This edited collection offers a comprehensive description of the consumer behavior process and the determinants that affect it in the era of digitalization. This book offers a holistic perspective of consumer behavior in the 21st century in different European cultures that are characterized by new technologies, including smartphones, AR, IoT, AI, and social media, as well as cultural changes and the Covid-19 pandemic. The first part of the book is devoted to characteristic phenomena in consumer behavior in the era of digitalization, such as changes in the consumer buying decision-making processes, e-commerce, prosumers' and consumers` attitudes towards innovations. The second part will describe the consumers, their decision-making processes, with examples from almost all geographical regions in Europe, including Germany, Spain, Italy, Finland, Poland and Russia. Both individually and collectively, the contributors provide discussion points and practical implications resulting from the changes observed in consumer behavior in each country. European Consumers in the Digital Era provides a comprehensive overview of digital consumer behavior, offering timely insights for scholars and researchers. It will also appeal to postgraduate students of related fields, including marketing, innovation and sociology.

The political changes witnessed over the last two decades in Eastern Europe propitiated the scenario for comparative analyses between these countries and their counterparts in advanced market economies. This interest materialised in many studies focused on productivity and efficiency analysis of firms or industrial sectors. Nevertheless, not many of them -both at macro and micro level- applied techniques related to the conceptual framework of non-parametric frontier efficiency (DEA) and distance functions to analyse economies of scale, cost efficiency, capacity utilisation degree or budget constrained profit maximisation. This book, therefore, provides not only a theoretical framework for these techniques but also the empirical output obtained from their application to industrial sectors in seven European countries - Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Romania and Spain- from 1995 to 1998. Beyond the perishable character of the information, this analysis should help enlarge the spectrum of non-parametric techniques' applications, and should be of interest to those working in the field, or anyone interested in learning more about European transition economies.