ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 Out in the Open: Understanding Consumer Acceptance Or Rejection of Colombia’S Black Market Mark S. Rosenbaum, Northern Illinois University & Universidad Externado, USA & Colombia Mauricio Losada Otálora, CESA, Colombia Germán Contreras Ramírez, Universidad Externado, Colombia Black market analysts note that the United States is the largest black market in the world, representing a $625.5 billion market within a $1.81 trillion global market. Today’s global black market represents the selling of 50 contraband products (e.g., counterfeit drugs, electronics, foods, cigarettes, toys, auto parts, purses, batteries, and drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, heroin) and illegal activities, (prostitution, human trafficking, human smuggling, and illegal gambling). Interestingly, black markets are typically clandestine, mobile, and temporal markets, which operate in informal places such as street corners, automobile trunks, back rooms, temporary “pop-up” shops (e.g., warehouses), private homes, or couched in the background of consumer-to-consumer markets; most notably, temporary marketplaces, such as those denoted as flea or night markets. However, in one country the black market flourishes as typical urban marketplaces, essentially discount malls, referred to as San Andresitos (Mattelart, 2012), despite their well-known association with selling contraband, smuggled, pirated, and counterfeit products, as well as being connected to illicit drug money--this country is Colombia. [to cite]: Mark S. Rosenbaum, Mauricio Losada Otálora, and Germán Contreras Ramírez (2017) ,"Out in the Open: Understanding Consumer Acceptance Or Rejection of Colombia’S Black Market", in LA - Latin American Advances in Consumer Research Volume 4, eds. Enrique P. Becerra, Ravindra Chitturi, and Maria Cecilia Henriquez Daza and Juan Carlos Londoño Roldan, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 5-10. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/1700008/la/v4_pdf/LA-04 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/.