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Book Review: A conceptual and methodological breakthrough in the study of consumption

When reading the article by Farley and Ring in the November 1970 issue of JMR about the empirical testing of the Howard-Sheth model, a thought struck me which must have occurred to many other students of marketing: are not most, if not all, consumer buying models designed to represent and predict the purchasing behavior of individuals in the marketplace? Yet how often we in marketing refer to the buyer as "her" or "the housewife"! And when we do this we immediately imply that she acts as a purchasing agent for the family, that is, on instructions which are the result of a consensus. I am not aware of the existence of any published sociological (or political) analysis of the household buying decision process beyond some work devoted to salesmen-family interaction. However, economists have been giving increasing attention to household behavior, building on the seminal work of Becker and David [1, 2]. Sirageldin's excellent slim monograph, written with the careful attention to theoretical analysis and statistical method that we have come to expect from the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center, is at least in part a valuable contribution to the economic model of the household. The author defines such a model in the following terms (p. 13):