The two leading online consumer-to-consumer platforms use very different revenue models: eBay.com in the United States uses a brokerage model in which sellers pay eBay on a transaction basis, whereas Taobao.com in China uses an advertising model in which sellers can use the basic platform service for free and pay Taobao for advertising services to increase their exposure. This paper studies how...

CONTEXT Commercial marketing is a critical but understudied element of the sociocultural environment influencing Americans' food and beverage preferences and purchases. This marketing also likely influences the utilization of goods and services related to physical activity and sedentary behavior. A growing literature documents the targeting of racial/ethnic and income groups in commercial adver...

This paper critically examines the morality of advertising by practitioners in spiritual healing and herbal medicine heretofore referred to as traditional medicine, in southern African urban societies. While the subject of traditional medicine has been heavily contested in medical studies in the last few decades, the monumental studies on the subject have emphasised the place of traditional med...

This brief report examines whether male sex workers mentioned any health concerns in their online ads. The analysis uses 203 male escorts' online ads collected from America Online chat rooms in 2001/2002. The results indicate that only 25 percent of male escorts explicitly mentioned any health-related words or phrases in their ads. The results also show that whether a male escort mentioned heal...

Search engines, referrals services, advisors, and other forms of information gatekeepers and recommenders, are omnipresent in today’s information-heavy economy. These services widely employ sponsored recommendations, wherein merchants pay the recommender in return for favorable placement in the recommender’s list. As a form of advertising, sponsored results can serve as a signaling mechanism wh...

This paper departs from prevailing ideas in current discussions about the critical role of advanced producer services for globalising cities. Saskia Sassen’s concept of global cities focuses on the function of advanced producer services and their role in the development of the central core of cities, i.e., the central business district (Sassen 1991, 1995). Peter Taylor and the research network ...