We introduce the concept of marketing avoidance--consumer efforts to conceal themselves and to deflect marketing. The setting is one in which sellers market some item through solicitations to potential consumers, who differ in their benefit from the item and suffer harm from receiving...

Despite annual expenditures on public relations exceeding $19.42 billion, U.S. businesses lack practical guidance about the effectiveness of publicity in mass media. Here, we assemble a rich and novel data set to gauge the impact of news reports on consumer sign-ups with the U.S. Do Not Call...

Publishers of computer software and music claimed losses of nearly $16 billion to piracy in 1999. Theoretically, however, piracy may raise legitimate demand through positive demand-side externalities, sampling, and sharing. Accordingly, the actual impact of piracy on the legitimate demand is an...

This chapter reviews economic analyses of privacy. We begin by scrutinizing the "free market" critique of privacy regulation. Welfare may be non-monotone in the quantity of information, hence there may be excessive incentive to collect information. This result applies to both non-productive and...

Most previous research into the digital divide has relied on archival or primary surveys of a cross-sectional nature. Their findings are sensitive to endogeneity and cannot identify variations in the digital divide over time. Other research focused on the digital provide, focusing on the impact...

If not well-targeted, advertising and direct marketing inflict nuisance and inconvenience on consumers. Theoretical analyses predict that consumer actions to avoid advertising impose externalities on other consumers. We investigate the extent of such externalities in the context of the U.S. Do...

Despite annual expenditures on public relations exceeding $19.42 billion, U.S. businesses lack practical guidance about the effectiveness of publicity in mass media. Here, we assemble a rich and novel data-set to gauge the impact of news reports on consumer sign-ups with the U.S. Do Not Call...

We embed the Varian (1980) model in a broader setting that considers how switcher/loyal customer segments are determined. Generally, customer acquisition is deterministic while pricing is randomized. The equilibrium outcome depends on the timing of customer acquisition relative to pricing. If...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of economic incentives on the international supply of big-screen movies. More particularly, we also study the impact of a 1998 increase in the term of copyright on U.S. movie production