Prescription drug expenditures are the fastest growing component of health care spending, rising threefold over the 1995–2007 period. Coinciding with this growth has been a surge in direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), made feasible by the Food and Drug Administrations's (FDA's)...

This review discusses the role of consumer-directed and physician-directed promotion in the pharmaceutical market, based on the classic conceptual framework of whether such promotion is "persuasive" and/or "informative". Implications for public health and welfare partly depend on whether, and to...

The digitalization of the every-day life also affects buying habits of customers. Changes that take place regarding these habits result in an increasing number of e-commerce retailers. Online-shops in the business-to-consumer field are especially successful with apparel and electronic products....

Over the years since airline deregulation five of the remaining U.S. legacy carriers lost money on mergers that cost them a total of $29.6 billion. The combined market cap of these carriers at the end of 2007 was $15.5 billion. In other words, their return on merger investments was -48%. Why?...

Improving business performance, profits, as well as economic growth in the globalisation age becomes vital for enterprises which efficiently and effectively foster and meet the reasonable expectancies of their stakeholders - consumers, employees, suppliers, investors, community and environment -...

Persuasion is a fundamental part of social activity, yet it is rarely studied by economists. We compare the traditional economic model, in which persuasion is communication of objectively valuable information, with a behavioral model, in which persuasion is an effort to fit the message into the...

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 paper provides empirical evidence that industry-specific non-financial metrics, whose disclosure is mandated by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) for the ten largest U.S. airlines, have explanatory power for top executive pay-for-performance relations beyond that provided by...

In this paper, we evaluate growth stocks by modeling a company's customer equity. We start with the observation that the number of customers in successful start-ups increases very quickly (exponentially) in the first few years. Then the customer base converges towards an industry average. On the...