their goods in order to bring consumers back. Related concepts Consumers' co-operative is an enterprise owned and managed democratically by its consumers. Dollar voting is the impact of consumer choice on producers' actions through the flow of consumer payments to producers for their goods and services. Ethical consumerism is a process by which consumers deliberately try to influence the production process according to their moral values, for example by preferring ethical producers or boycotting non-ethical ones. Resource dependence theory is the theory that production depends on resources available from the environment, rather than just on consumers' demand. Consumer sovereignty in welfare Consumer sovereignty is defined in the Macmillan dictionary of modern economics as:The idea that the consumer is the best judge of his or her own welfare. This assumption underlies the theory of consumer behaviour and through it the bulk of economic analysis including the most widely accepted optimum in welfare economics, the Pareto optimum. A more detailed definition was given by Abba P. Lerner:The basic idea of consumer sovereignty is really very simple: arrange for everybody to have what he prefers whenever this does not involve any extra sacrifice for anybody else.… One of the deepest scars of my early youth was etched when my teacher told me, “You do not want that,” after I had told her that I did. I would not have been so upset if she had said that I could not have it, whatever it was, or that it was very wicked of me to want it. What rankled was the denial of my personality—a kind of rape of my integrity. I confess I still find a similar rising of my hackles when I hear people's preferences dismissed as not genuine, because influenced or even created by advertising, and somebody else telling them what they “really want.” Empirical evidence A possible way to test the consumer sovereignty assumption is to compare consumers' valuations of items they purchase on their own, to their valuations of items they receive as gifts from friends and family. In one such experiment, done during a holiday season, it was found that consumers value their own purchases about 18% more than the gifts they receive. This supports the consumer sovereignty assumption. Another experiment compared the effects of two parallel government programs in Mexico, both intended to help poor villagers: the first provided cash transfers, and the second provided food transfers.