Freelancers face cold-start problems in online labor markets: getting hired is very difficult without ratings, while obtaining a rating is impossible unless already having been hired. According to economic theory and empirical evidence, advertising can serve as a signal of product quality for...

The last decades have seen large improvements in digital advertising technology that allowed firms to better target specific consumer tastes. This research studies the relationship among digital advertising, the rise of varieties, and economic welfare. We develop a model of advertising and...

The advertising efforts in social networks grow every year. Since their appearance in the late 1990s Social Network Web Sites were considered as a uniform group. The only differentiation factors were the number of users and the amount of traffic passed through the site. This paper classifies the...

Disclaimers are widely used by firms to warn customers of dangers and limitations of their products, and are persuasive when the issue is important. We examine the effects of mandatory disclaimers. Speech restrictions conflict with basic economic incentives. Sellers are motivated by profit to...

Cooperative promotion is an important instrument for aligning manufacturer and retailer decisions in marketing channels. On the other hand, bargaining seems to be critical for marketing channel coordination, e.g., for vertical cooperative promotion. Based on our previous study (Spais,...

Building a strong brand today is incredibly difficult. A strong brand can turn a commoditised, undifferentiated product into something unique and special. For instance, as soon as you put the brand of Tiffany on a diamond, the value of the diamond shoots up. It is no longer just a diamond, it is...

Advertising pre-testing (or copy testing) is often employed in sales forecasting. It helps to quantify the impact of advertising on generating awareness, trial and repeat purchases. This paper reviews existing copy testing practices and makes some practical recommendations in the context of...

Simulated test marketing (STM) is a quantitative technique used to forecast new product sales, one of the most validated tools in all marketing research. Forecasting awareness is an important stage in that process, one critical to STM performance. Awareness models incorporated into popular STMs...