Digital Commons Network^™

Essays On Advertising, Sodium Intake, And Soda Taxes, Ezgi Cengiz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation empirically explores the economics of advertising, sodium intake, and sweetened beverage taxes in food and beverages industries in the United States. I use recent advances in econometrics and statistics and provide causally interpretable results to deepen our understanding of how individuals respond to changes in advertising and public health policies in consumer packaged good industries. In the first chapter, titled “Is traditional advertising effective? New evidence from mass-produced lager beer in the United States,” I present new evidence regarding the effectiveness of traditional advertising on product demand for mass-produced lager beer in the United States using …

The Limits Of Location Privacy In Mobile Devices, Keen Yuun Sung

Doctoral Dissertations

Mobile phones are widely adopted by users across the world today. However, the privacy implications of persistent connectivity are not well understood. This dissertation focuses on one important concern of mobile phone users: location privacy. I approach this problem from the perspective of three adversaries that users are exposed to via smartphone apps: the mobile advertiser, the app developer, and the cellular service provider. First, I quantify the proportion of mobile users who use location permissive apps and are able to be tracked through their advertising identifier, and demonstrate a mark and recapture attack that allows continued tracking of users …

Am I In A Healthy Relationship? Exploring Emotional Consequences Of Young Women’S Relationships With Social Media Influencers, Betsy Byrne Desimone

Doctoral Dissertations

In order to enjoy the benefits of technology, we must understand the potential harmful effects. This study uses a qualitative approach to investigate the implications of young women following and developing a relationship with social media influencers. Young women were chosen because they are the most vulnerable group when it comes to using social media. Results came from a total of 12 interviews suggesting that women develop strong relationships with social media influencers. The implications for the women are often harmful, but as they grow older they learn coping techniques.

Effect Of Social Media Characteristics On Perceptions Of Alcohol-Branded Social Media Content, Jonathan K. Noel

Doctoral Dissertations

Background: Alcohol advertising has recently expanded onto social networking sites (SNSs), which allows users to interact with alcohol ads through user engagement features (e.g. Likes or Shares) and user-generated comments. Few studies have evaluated alcohol advertising on SNSs or investigated how ad interactivity may influence ad perceptions. Two inter-related studies were conducted to answer these questions. Methods: In Study 1, alcohol advertising posted on Facebook by Budweiser and Bud Light were evaluated for compliance with a self-regulated alcohol advertising code and for thematic content. User-generated comments written in response to these ads were also evaluated. The results of this study …

Advertising And The Creation Of Exchange Value, Zoe Sherman

Doctoral Dissertations

Advertising and the Creation of Exchange Value explores the economics of the industry and the commodification of communications that characterizes consumer goods advertising in the U.S. I consider three phases of communications that take on three distinct commodity forms. First is access to attention, the interception of the audience’s perception; Chapter One, “The Commodification of Audience Attention in the U.S., 1865-1920” traces the conversion of audience attention to commodity form as advertising space/time. Second is content; Chapter Two, “The Value Analytics of Advertising,” examines the nature of advertising content as a commodified form of speech, produced on demand for purchasers …

The Lived Meanings Of Product Placement In Social Network Sites (Snss) Among Urban Chinese White-Collar Professional Users: A Story Of Happy Network, Huan Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

A phenomenology study reveals the lived meanings of product placement in social network sites (SNSs) among Chinese urban, white-collar professional users through an investigation of a newly launched SNS, Happy Network. In total, 25 face-to-face, in-depth interviews were conducted to collect data. Findings indicated that participants’ interpretations of product placement were interrelated with the socially constructed meanings of the SNS, participants’ social role of white-collar professionals, and the consumer culture of contemporary Chinese society. In particular, the emerged themes with regard to the shared meanings of the SNS include five dialectic relations: in control/controlled by, dependent/independent, public/private, intimate/distant, and personal/social. …

Exploring And Explaining Consumer Competition: A Mixed-Methods Approach To Understanding The Phenomenon, Bridget M Satinover Nichols

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the phenomenon of “consumer competition.” The overarching objective is to help researchers and marketing practitioners understand how the phenomenon is created, how consumers experience competition, and to begin to inspect its effects. Consumer competition is defined as the active processes of striving against others for the acquisition of a consumption object. To date, this phenomenon has been under-researched, despite its prevalence in many marketing and consumer-related domains.

An extensive literature synthesis provides the foundation for understanding competition and competitiveness in general from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Based on the synthesis of literature and …

An Examination Of The Interfaces Between Operations And Advertising Strategies, Abdullahel Bari

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three journals examining the interfaces between the marketing variable of advertising and various aspects of the operations function of the enterprise, namely, (1) production cost [Chapter 2], (2) inventory control [Chapter 3], and (3) service cost learning [Chapter 4]. The first journal identified the optimum advertising allocation policy over time in the presence of a quadratic convex/concave production cost function when the advertising response function is concave using a modified Vidale-Wolfe model. Through analytical proofs and numerical simulations, the results indicated the potential superiority of a pulsation policy in the presence of concavity in the …

Optimum Advertising Pulsation Strategies: A Dynamic Programming Approach, Hongkai Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

This study, using the dynamic programming approach, has addressed the problem of optimally allocating a fixed advertising budget of a monopolistic firm over a planning horizon comprised of n equal periods to maximize two popular measures of advertising performance: (1) profits related to the advertising effort (discount factor r = 0), and (2) present value of profits related to the advertising effort (discount factor r > 0).

Two dynamic programming models that use the modified Vidale-Wolfe model to represent sales response to advertising are formulated with respect to whether the time value of money is considered. For a planning horizon comprised …