Self-regulation programs deter many advertising practices, but there are inherent limitations to its power in the United States. U.S. media vehicle managers' advertising acceptance policies may influence advertising content, but their decisions often are focused on priorities other than consumer protection. This article describes the power limitations of U.S. selfregulation and media advertisin...

Consumer's attitude toward mobile advertising has drawn lots of attention for a long time. Previous studies verified and emphasized that consumer’s attitude toward mobile advertising is significantly affected by the perceived entertainment, informativeness and credibility of an advertisement which affect the way consumers evaluate it. However, the general attitude toward how advertising manifes...

A important question that firms face in advertising is developing effective media strategy. Major improvements in the quality of consumer information and the growth of targeted media vehicles allow firms to precisely target advertising to consumer segments within a market. This paper examines advertising strategy when competing firms can target advertising to different groups of consumers withi...

Improved consumer information about horizontal aspects of products of similar quality leads to better consumer matching but also higher prices, so consumer surplus can go up or down, while proÞts rise. With enough quality asymmetry though, the higher quality (and hence larger) Þrm’s price falls with more information, so both effects beneÞt consumers. This is when comparative advertising is used...

This paper studies the implications of consumer reference dependence for market competition. If consumers take some product (e.g., the first product they consider) as the reference point when evaluating others and exhibit loss aversion, then the more “prominent” firm whose product is taken as the reference point by more consumers will randomize over a high and a low price. Relative to the stand...

Internet advertising has seen tremendous revenue growth through its ability to effectively target consumer interest. However, it fails to reach consumers in as wide a range of activities as traditional advertising. This paper describes the opportunity for performing highly targeted activity-based advertising. By better representing human needs and activities, it will become possible to effectiv...

We examine the effect of direct mail (commonly referred to as junk mail) advertising on individual financial decisions by studying consumer choice of debt contracts. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, we find that financial variables underlying the relative pricing of debt contracts are the leading factors explaining consumers debt choice. Furthermore, we also find that the intended u...