I propose a neurally motivated network model of advertising where advertisements create complementarities among the directly observable attributes of a product, allowing a brand to obtain social value. The formalization of this process allows us to examine the indirect effects of advertising in...

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...

Using a unique, hand-collected dataset, we find a significant positive relation between a firm's U.S. advertising spending and its contemporaneous foreign cash flow. This relation holds even after controlling for factors that should be related to the optimal level of U.S. advertising, and it is...

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,...

The independence of editorial content from advertisers' influence is a cornerstone of journalistic ethics. We test whether this independence is observed in practice. We find that mutual fund recommendations are correlated with past advertising in three personal finance publications but not in...

The accounting and mutual fund scandals of the last few years have led to increased scrutiny over the information provided by financial services to investors. These scandals have cast doubt on the supposedly honest and impartial reporting of facts by the financial industry. This paper looks at...

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...

Ambush marketing is a marketing strategy that intersects with the law of unfair competition and one that provokes debate and competing arguments. The arguments of event organisers and sponsors have proved to be influential and, in response to pressure from those parties, legislatures in a number...

Numerous laboratory studies report on behaviors inconsistent with rational economic models. How much do these inconsistencies matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to learn from experiences? We report on a field experiment designed to...