This paper examines the role that advertising plays in the mutual fund industry and whether advertising affects investors' fund and portfolio choices. Content analysis shows that only a small fraction of fund advertising is directly informative about characteristics relevant for rational...

Monetary gifts in the form of a gift card can lead one to spend and conceive of these funds differently than if the gift is given as cash. Across four experiments, the presentation of a gift card rather than cash led to both intended and actual spending beyond the amount of the original gift,...

We present a model of coarse thinking, in which individuals group situations into categories, and transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not. The model explains how uninformative messages can be persuasive,...

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of the firm's proactive management of consumer-to-consumer communication. We are particularly interested in understanding how, if at all, the firm should go about effecting meaningful word-of-mouth. To tackle this problem, we implemented a...

This Note analyzes the Truth in Truth in Domain Names Act of 2003, the first piece of legislation to criminalize the registration of a misleading Internet domain name with the intent to deceive a person into viewing obscenity, and the first case successfully prosecuted under the Act, United...

The last ten years have seen a growing number of optimal control theory applications to the field of advertising. This paper presents an up-to-date survey of dynamic optimal control models in advertising that have appeared in the literature.The basic problem underlying these models is an optimal...