Abstract

Using GIS to Identify Socioeconomic Impact Factors on Consumer Sentiment
Track: Commercial Business
Authors: Carsten Lange, Lynda Rush

The impact of socioeconomic variables on Consumer Sentiment is expanded upon in this paper to take into account geospatial factors. The paper is based on data from the March 2008 survey conducted by The Center for the Study of the Inland Empire (CSIE) including five questions on consumer sentiment. The goal of the paper is to identify and quantify socioeconomic variables that impact consumer sentiment in the study area. More specifically we investigate how consumer sentiment is impacted by the political view of the survey respondents and their political environment voting precinct. Our results show that consumer sentiment related to future economic conditions is indeed influenced statistically significantly by both political view and political environment. A geographically weighted regression further shows that these effects are stronger the closer a respondent lives to the Los Angeles urban area.