Firms striving to reach consumers through today's swell of marketing clutter frequently are employing novel marketing practices. Although many nontraditional marketing messages are effective through clever, entertaining, and ultimately benign means, others rely on deception to reach consumers....

In this paper we investigate how direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of pharmaceutical products in affected by regulations of the Food and Drug Administration and by market conditions. We focus on a relatively under-studied segment of the pharmaceutical market -- the market for smoking...