“Consumer Power Asymmetries: Stretching Household Consumption via Consumption Informality in South Texas”

The focus of this paper is on the consumers of informal goods and services in the South Texas borderlands. Utilizing an extensive purposive sample of 357 respondents from the summer of 2010 conducted in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, we model the market for informal consumption of household purchases. We find that nearly all consumers in the region at some point engage informal consumption. Within the model, important demographic variables (age, education, ethnicity, gender, and residence), moderating variables (income), and facilitation mechanisms (cash payment, morality of informal consumption) help to explain informal consumption.