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A dynamic oligopoly model of the cigarette industry is developed to study the responses of firms to various antismoking policies and to estimate the implications for the policy efficacy. The structural parameters are estimated using a combination of micro and macro level data and firms’ optimal price and advertising strategies are solved as a Markov Perfect Nash Equilibrium. The simulation results show that tobacco tax increase reduces both the overall smoking rate and the youth smoking rate, while advertising restrictions may increase the youth smoking rate. Firm’s responses strengthen the impact of antismoking policies in the short run.

This chapter presents a summary of the literature on the influence of the Internet and other digital innovations on markets, consumers, and firms. The review leads to a list of topics in need of research in the general areas of big data, online and mobile advertising, consumer search, online privacy, online reviews, social networks, platforms for online transactions, and the impact of the Internet on retail markets, including multi-channel and omni-channel retailing. We discuss the big data approaches that have been applied to problems of targeting and positioning and suggest areas for further development of these approaches. We also discuss the emerging area of mobile advertising, which can further enhance targeting. On the consumer side, the evidence indicates that the Internet has greatly lowered the costs of search and access to retailers. Much of the consumer data are transmitted to sellers, and much of the online advertising is transmitted to consumers, through platforms, such as Google. We conclude that better models of competition among these platform firms are needed and that they need to be examined for anti-trust violations. While online retailing has grown rapidly, it still has a relatively small share of retail sales. Since sellers can combine the advantages of online and offline channels, it has been common for sellers to branch into multi-channel retailing. Given the increased availability of detailed consumer data, omni-channel selling, which emphasizes strategies for the various touchpoints that lead to a transaction, is an area for further development.

The chapter examined the consumer meanings of product placements embedded in social games in different cultural contexts.

The theoretical perspective guiding the study is phenomenology, and the essay assignment and in-depth interviews were used to collect data.

The chapter was based on two qualitative research projects. Findings revealed that consumers in both countries appreciated certain characteristics of product placement in the context of social game, such as subtleness (naturalness) and unobtrusiveness (users’ freedom of choice and proactive choice); consumers’ real-world consumption in both countries seems to be more or less influenced by the product placement in social games; and while the young American consumers didn’t construct specific meanings for Facebook, the Chinese white-collar consumers actively created meanings for the Chinese social-network site.

The chapter offered some thick descriptions and in-depth analyses of product placements in social games in different cultural contexts from consumers’ experiential perspectives to enrich our theoretical understanding of product placement in the new media environment as well as to add valuable insights to the research literature on new advertising formats in general.

No study to date has been conducted to explore the product placement in social games in different cultural contexts. The study fills the research gap by exploring US college-aged consumers’ and Chinese white-collar consumers’ interpretations of product placements in the context of social games.

This chapter surveys the literatures on advertising bans and alcohol consumption or abuse, and advertising expenditures and alcohol consumption. Studies of state-level bans of billboards are examined as well as studies of international bans that cover broadcasting media. For expenditures, the survey concentrates on econometric methods and the existence of an industry advertising-sales response function. Selected results from survey-research studies of advertising and youth alcohol behaviors also are discussed. The chapter concludes that advertising bans do not reduce alcohol consumption or abuse; advertising expenditures do not have a marketwide expansion effect; and survey-research studies of youth behaviors are seriously incomplete as a basis for public policy. Results of the survey are applied to the Supreme Court's Central Hudson test for constitutionality of restrictions on commercial speech.

In this chapter, the authors review emerging literature on multidimensional, information age-related phenomena across different disciplines to derive common themes and topics. The authors then proceed to analyse recent developments in these fields to provide an interdisciplinary overview of the most disruptive challenges for multinational companies (MNCs) competing in the modern information age. These challenges include more efficient peer-to-peer communication between stakeholders, crowd-organisation, globalisation of value chains and the need to organise knowledge resources. The aim of the chapter is not to review all age research, but to identify fundamental uncertainties for MNCs and discuss strategies of tackling such information age phenomena from an international business perspective.

A meta-evaluation is an assessment of evaluation practices. Meta-evaluations include assessments of validity and usefulness of two or more studies that focus on the same issues. Every performance audit is grounded explicitly or implicitly in one or more theories of program evaluation. A deep understanding of alternative theories of program evaluation is helpful to gain clarity about sound auditing practices. We present a review of several theories of program evaluation.

This study includes a meta-evaluation of seven government audits on the efficiency and effectiveness of tourism departments and programs. The seven tourism-marketing performance audits are program evaluations for: Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Minnesota, Australia, and two for Hawaii. The majority of these audits are negative performance assessments. Similarly, although these audits are more useful than none at all, the central conclusion of the meta-evaluation is that most of these audit reports are inadequate assessments. These audits are too limited in the issues examined; not sufficiently grounded in relevant evaluation theory and practice; and fail to include recommendations, that if implemented, would result in substantial increases in performance.

In a number of recent multi-billion dollar cases brought against cigarette manufacturers, plaintiffs have in part alleged that the cigarette manufacturers (1) conspired not to compete on the basis of health claims or the introduction of potentially safer cigarettes since the 1950s, and (2) engaged in fraudulent advertising by making implied health claims in advertisements selling ‘low tar’/‘light’ cigarettes. In this type of litigation, defendants’ actions could be due to alleged illegal behaviour as asserted by plaintiffs, or be the result of market forces that may have nothing to do with allegedly inappropriate acts. We examine the economic evidence relating to these allegations, taking into account some of the major influences on cigarette company behaviour. In particular, our analyses show that much of the cigarette manufactures’ behaviour can be explained by Federal Trade Commission and related government actions, rather than conspiracy or fraudulent acts. We find the economic evidence is inconsistent with an effective conspiracy to suppress information on either smoking and health or the development and marketing of potentially safer cigarettes. Regarding ‘lower tar’ and ‘light’ cigarettes, the economic evidence indicates that the cigarette manufacturers responded to government and public health initiatives, and that disclosing more information on smoking compensation earlier than the cigarette companies did would not have had any significant impact on smoking behaviour.