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This paper aims to examine preferences for different smoking cessation tools, investigates smokers’ perceptions of these tools by examining their brand personalities and determines whether these perceptions predict intentions to use particular cessation tools.

Two surveys of smokers evaluated cessation tools from electronic cigarettes to hypnosis.

Smokers showed a strong preference for electronic cigarettes over other cessation tools. Different aspects of brand personality predicted intention to use different cessation tools.

The research used online surveys rather than real purchasing behavior. The results indicate that advertisements emphasizing the personality attributes of different cessation tools could be effective in encouraging the use of appropriate cessation tools.

If research validates e-cigarettes as a valuable cigarette smoking cessation tool, then public service advertisements encouraging their use should emphasize their sincerity and excitement. If e-cigarettes have a net negative effect on public health, public service advertising should stress that the marketing of e-cigarettes is not sincere.

This research extends the idea of brand personality, showing how it can encourage behavior that promotes public health goals.

Considers the differences between consumer perceptions of nonmonetary promotions such as free extra product and monetary promotions such as discounts and rebates. Reports on an experiment which found that monetary promotions did not have to be as large as nonmonetary promotions to be noticed by the consumer, and that large incentives make consumers sceptical. Concludes that the decision about which type of promotion to use depends on whether a price‐conscious or a premium product market segment is being sought.

Informed by the literature on regional security and fragile states, ‘new regionalisms’, and natural resources and violent conflict, this essay investigates the challenges of state-building in West Africa. These range from the influence of diasporas and subregional strongmen to flows of small arms and light weapons (SALWs) and lootable natural resources. The analytical framework that links patron–client networks and lootable natural resources is applied to the cases of Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire. In recent years, strategies by African leaders to co-opt subregional strongmen as part of patronage networks have failed. The essay finds that an ossified state presence and the erosion of a leader's influence enables subregional strongmen to gain control over valuable natural resources, such as diamonds. The essay then assesses the impact of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) on state-building, concluding that although international regimes like the KPCS can increase state capacity and thereby counter the deleterious effects of state failure, they are not sufficient state-building tools. Hence, the KPCS must be supplemented through a combination of more explicit state-building initiatives under the auspices of bilateral government donors, aid agencies, diasporas and transnational and local NGOs.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Surveys, from an American perspective, the existing literature on economic explanations of the behaviour of universities and scholars. The modern literature is put in historical perspective introduced by a brief discussion of the positions of two of the earliest and most distinguished contributors to the literature: Adam Smith and Max Weber. Discusses the human capital and implicit contracts literatures of the behaviour of scholars, the latter elaborated in terms of the issue of tenure. The most common theoretical economic analysis of the university is the view that it is best thought of as a non‐profit organization. Discusses variants of this view, with special attention to the literature on rent‐seeking in academe. Goes on to the empirical literature on the economics of academe in the areas of academic institutions, academic earnings functions, the earnings and status of minority scholars and academic production functions. Briefly considers the relevance of the current literature to the Althoff system, suggesting that Althoff′s able, trusted advisers, and his system of institutes, may have allowed him to avoid several inefficiences that have been identified by economists as present in other academic institutions. Although the centralization of decision making in the hands of one decision maker may be efficient if the decision maker is exceptionally able, more commonly the most efficient system will be a decentralized system that allows for greater diversity and competition. Concludes with a discussion of how hypotheses on the efficiency (and fairness) of various aspects of the Althoff system could, in principle, be tested.

The chapter examines and challenges the assumed necessity of a linkage between remembered series of exchanges, amicable social relations, and prestige found in the work of Marcel Mauss and many subsequent theorists of reciprocity and gift exchange.

The chapter uses the nearly 500 year history of the giving and taking of the Koh-i-noor Diamond by rulers of South and Central Asia, commencing with Babur, the first Mughal emperor, and ending with Queen Victoria, which includes some gift giving and much taking by force, to explore what happens when only two of the three elements Mauss assumed central to understanding gift exchange are present.

Based on a review of the historical material, the chapter demonstrates that though historical narratives or memories of exchanges were central to enhancing the prestige of the parties to the exchange and the diamond itself, that process could and did occur in the absence of any on-going amicable social relations, including in situations in which exchange or transfer of the diamond were coerced and nothing was given in return to the dispossessed former owner of the gem.

By suggesting an alternative configuration of the factors necessary for the association of exchange and prestige, the chapter provides the opportunity to reconsider assumptions common in the literature on gift exchange and further enhance our understanding of this central element of social theory.

Historians have long understood that transforming people into property was the defining characteristic of Atlantic World slavery. This chapter examines litigation in British colonial Vice Admiralty Courts in order to show how English legal categories and procedures facilitated this process of dehumanization. In colonies where people were classified as chattel property, litigants transformed local Vice Admiralty Courts into slave courts by analogizing human beings to ships and cargo. Doing so made sound economic sense from their perspective; it gave colonists instant access to an early modern English legal system that was centered on procedures and categories. But for people of African descent, it had decidedly negative consequences. Indeed, when colonists treated slaves as property, they helped to create a world in which Africans were not just like things, they were things. Through the very act of categorization, they rendered factual what had been a mere supposition: that Africans were less than human.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.