Consumer Interest Alliance Inc.

Dr. Robert Kerton

Department of Economics
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1 
Tel: 519 888-4567 x33016      kerton@uwaterloo.ca   or   bob@kerton.com

Bob Kerton serves as President of Consumers Interest Alliance Incorporated.  Born in London, Ontario, where he received his early education, Bob earned his PhD degree from Duke University in 1969.   Dr. Kerton has been a long time researcher and consumer advocate on trade, pricing, competition, monopoly, and service quality.   He has authored some sixty published studies, including  Double Standards: Consumer and Worker Protection in an Unequal World (1990), and - for the MacKay Task Force - Consumers in the Financial Services Sector, (1998). 

Dr. Kerton served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo from 1999 to 2006. In 2003-04 he was elected President of the American Council on the Consumer Interests, the 50-year-old association of consumer researchers and educators. Bob was Visiting Research Associate at Consumers International in Penang, Malaysia in 1982 and at Norway’s Consumer Research Institute in 1990.

As part of his public interest work, he served as an elected member of Canada’s national consumers' association, and over three decades he testified on more than sixty occasions as an expert witness at parliamentary hearings or other official enquiries. From 1994-96 Bob served as Chair of the Board of the North-South Institute. He has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, and at the European Institute for Advanced studies in Management in Brussels. He is currently an Academic Advisor to the Indian Institute for Consumer Studies, Bangalore, India. Dr. Kerton earned the Russell Dixon prize awarded by the American Council on the Consumer Interests for the best article in Advancing the Consumer Interest, presented in Washington, DC, March 25, 1998 for "This Deregulation May Be Hazardous to your Health."

 Selected Publications:

1995 Robert R. Kerton and Richard W. Bodell, "Quality, Choice and the Economics of Concealment: The Marketing of Lemons:" The Journal of Consumer Affairs, 29(1), pp.1-28.

1996 "Appropriate Products in Sustainable Development: Who Uses the WHO List of Essential Drugs?" Canadian Journal of Development Studies, XVII, (2), pp. 279-92.

1998 “Locus of Control for Consumer Outcomes: Predicting Consumer Behavior,” with M. A. Busseri and H. M. Lefcourt, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28, 12, pp. 1067-87. 

2006 "Competition Policy: Quality Matters," Consumer Policy Review, 16 (5), pp. 176-81