Marketing researchers often assume that innovation diffusion is affected by social contagion. However, there is increasing skepticism about the importance of contagion and, as has long been known, S-shaped diffusion curves can also result from heterogeneity in the propensity to adopt. To gain...

Cutting advertising budgets has traditionally been a popular reaction by companies around the globe when faced with a slacking economy. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests the presence of considerable cross-country variability in the cyclical sensitivity of advertising expenditures. We conduct a...