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Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M Widespread advertising of high-carbon goods challenges a shift to low-carbon consumption which is needed to limit climate change. We test the pure and combined effects of advertising and communicating a social norm on low- and high-carbon consumption. This involved presenting to 2728 US citizens an imitation Facebook homepage containing green and non-green advertising as well as weak and strong social norms to nudge low-carbon consumption. In isolation, both green advertising and social norms were effective in promoting low-carbon choices. But when combined, advertising dominated choice and counteracted the positive effects of the social norm. We show that this result is due to advertising affecting more decision channels than the social norm. It suggests that low-carbon norms have a limited effectiveness in changing consumer preferences in a world dominated by advertising.

Goal-based categories have recently emerged as an alternative perspective to the dominant account of prototypical market categories. However, key questions remain regarding the mechanisms that would enable stable market exchanges to form around ad hoc and idiosyncratic goal-based categories. Thus, we sought to answer the following question: How can goal-based categorization enable stable market transactions? Through an inductive study drawing on industry discourse, participant observation, and interview data from the online advertising industry, we describe the category infrastructure that enables buyers and sellers to engage in market exchanges using goal-based categorization. Three mechanisms are integral to goal-based categorization in market exchanges: dimensioning (establishing a possibility space in which valuation can take place through the identification, addition, and/or deletion of product features), scoping (selecting particular features in the possibility space), and bracketing (excluding certain actors from participating in market transactions). Moreover, the fundamental principle of valuation in goal-based categorization is goal-based attribution, which involves iteratively adding and deleting features to accommodate evolving goals. Our findings suggest novel directions for work on goal-based categorization as an important element of valuation in modern markets.

The European Union’s (EU) strategy to address the spread of disinformation, and most notably the Code of Practice on Disinformation and the forthcoming Digital Services Act, tasks digital platforms with a range of actions to minimise the distribution of issue-based and political adverts that are verifiably false or misleading. This article discusses the implications of the EU’s approach with a focus on its categorical approach, specifically what it means to conceptualise disinformation as a form of advertisement and by what standards digital platforms are expected to assess the truthful or misleading nature of the content that they distribute because of this categorisation. The analysis will show how the emerging EU anti-disinformation framework marks a departure from the European Court of Human Rights’ consolidated standards of review for public interest and commercial speech and the tests utilised to assess their accuracy.

Misinformation, political polarization, its links, and negative societal consequences have long been studied in literature. This study contributes to this field by exploring the relationship of political polarization, using a novel measure that captures political support for President Duterte (representing the administration) against political support for Vice President Robredo (representing the opposition) on a spectrum, and the vulnerability of the Filipino youth to online misinformation through an online survey conducted among college-aged students in various colleges and universities across the Philippines. We find evidence that partisan supporters of President Duterte are more likely to inaccurately identify fake and real news, compared to partisan supporters of the opposition. This is remarkably similar to trends in the United States where Republicans are more vulnerable to misinformation. Other results also highlight possible trends, such as the link between increased self-reported frequency of seeing fake news and decreased likelihood of correctly identifying fake news, and the link between increased trust in news in social media and decreased odds of correctly identifying both real and fake news.

As social media platforms have become a staple news source for many EU citizens, we model repurposed Eurobarometer data from 27 EU member states to explore the possible polarising effects of social media use on public opinion about European integration. In a first step, we investigate whether social media use is correlated with decreased trust in the EU. In a second step, we probe the link between social media news consumption, fake news and polarisation by expanding the cross-sectional analysis with EU level analyses of the interaction between social media use and fake news. Our research paper finds no significant correlation between social media use and increased Euroscepticism at either step. We argue that this lack of significant social media effects at the aggregate level is an argument for why future research on social media effects should incorporate measures of these effects at both the individual and societal level. Thus, while our study focuses on a European context, it holds important lessons for future social media research outside of Europe too.

Most of the respondents are from the age bracket of 51 and above (36.364 %). There are more males (54.55%) than the female. All of the three families have 1-3 children each (100%). Less than half are college graduates (36.3645), Most receive a monthly salary of 16,000-30,000, and with no income reported (36.364%), less than one-fourth receives a salary of 31,000 and above (18.181%). A little less than half are still going to school (45.455%) and (36.364%) are private employees. All of the respondents (100%) have access to the internet. More than half are provided with PLDT. (66.67%). An equal proportion of the respondents uses laptop, desktop, and tablet and uses a cellphone. The brand of gadgets used by the respondents is Samsung, Toshiba, Cloud Phone, Huawei, Nokia and Lenovo, Asus, and Apple. More than half (66.67%) use the internet from five to nine hours a day. The respondents mostly visited sites are Facebook and YouTube on the internet. When the family members arrive from school or work, the usual scenario is to immediately connect to the internet and check Facebook or YouTube to watch a series. There is no conversation happened between the members of the family because each is busy on their gadget connected to the internet. Dinner together is still observed by the three families being studied. Because they still believe that this is the only time wherein they can talk together, share what had transpired the whole day outside the home. Personal interaction and communication between family members in the home have lesser time compared to when there was no internet connection. Saturdays, Sundays, or holidays are a time to spend quality time with the family members where everybody has longer hours of staying in the home.

This paper studies a multiple-receiver Bayesian persuasion model, where a sender communicates with receivers who have homogeneous beliefs and aligned preferences. The sender wants to implement a proposal and commits to a communication strat- egy which sends private (possibly) correlated messages to the receivers, who are in an exogenous and commonly known network. Receivers can observe their neighbors’ private messages and after updating their beliefs, vote sincerely on the proposal. We examine how networks of shared information affect the sender’s gain from persua- sion and find that in many cases it is not restricted by the additional information provided by the receivers’ neighborhoods. Perhaps surprisingly, the sender’s gain from persuasion is not monotonically decreasing with the density of the network.

Although the importance of over-the-air broadcasting has gradually dwindled in the entire media market, no one cannot deny local broadcasters' significant contribution to serving informational needs in local communities (FCC, 1999). Regarding local television's Twitter use for promotion and branding, Greer and Ferguson (2011) examined Twitter sites of 488 local television stations in the U.S. to identify the relationship between stations' status and content of stations' Twitter sites. They found that most local television stations offer news stories but barely direct viewers to their actual on-air programming. In their other study (Ferguson and Greer, 2011), they analyzed 111 local radio stations' Twitter sites to understand how regional radio stations use their business. The previous studies successfully demonstrate how local broadcasters use Twitter, but they do not capture any differences among broadcasters with different conditions. This study empirically analyzes how local broadcasters from different conditions utilize Twitter to adapt to the digitalized interactive media environment. Local broadcasters' social media performance can differ because American local broadcast markets differ in market size (Designated Market Area) and funding system (commercial vs. public), and station ownership. Thus, the scope of this study is limited to two extreme cases for comparison's sake. For comparative analysis, this study will analyze two different local different broadcasters groups – one group from Nielsen's top 20 DMA and another group from the bottom 20 DMA. Local broadcasters' Tweets from two other groups are analyzed to address the differences in Twitter uses 1) between public and commercial stations, and 2) between high-resourced (top DMA) and low-resourced (bottom DMA) market. This study will implement two methods to investigate the local broadcasters' local service activities in social network platforms, Twitter. First, website research collects qualitative and quantitative information directly from the studied websites. The website research will delineate the local broadcasters' current social media adoption. Second, network analysis of Twitter networks conducts to describe the complex conversational interaction within the Twitter network. Network analysis (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005) is one way to visualize and analyze how social media networks are connected, how they interact, and which agent is most influential in networks. The open-source program NodeXL will be used for network analysis and visualization of study results among the social network analysis tools. As a result, this study will address whether local broadcasters, which is often considered a thing of the past, still can justify their existence in the age of fiber-optic broadband and app-based mobile-centered media environment.

Images-cum-texts are remarkable instruments of persuasion; that seems the reason for their romantic intimacy in many advertising communications. Thus, this paper examined some connections that exist among the product, image, and text as devices communicating a single message to readers. Ten advertisements focusing on food items and telecommunications were utilized for analysis. The concepts of coherence as well as cohesion, expressed through interpersonal interactions were prerogatives of expounding the textual interconnectivity of the clauses. This study revealed an association of meaning potential within the generic domains of poetry and prose as fascinating devices to attract consumers. Texts played a distinct role of relaying images and a collaborative function to anchor images to achieve persuasion. Contextually, socio-cultural settings of enjoyment, happiness, self-exaltation and vigor in the form of personification characterized consumers’ sensitizations. Besides, the advertisements engaged metaphors of pride, unity, and children orientation to stimulate consumption. We suggested that publicists could consistently deploy coherence facilities in advertising to convey/communicate appropriate meaning to recipients.

Though the two-part tariff is a widely adopted pricing strategy, research on it is lacking. In this paper, we establish a model of a two-part tariff product with persuasive advertising, informative advertising, and process innovation using optimal control theory. We apply Taylor’s theorem to analyze the properties of the nonlinear dynamic system and the shooting method to solve the numerical problem. We find that the pricing strategy is consistent with a two-part tariff in the static state, with price affected only by process innovation. The relationship between the two types of advertisements is affected by the advertising spillover effect, which represents the similarity of the roles of the two types of advertisements. The more similar the roles of the advertisements are, the more likely they are to be supplemented. Meanwhile, the advertising spillover effect also indicates the quality of an advertisement. The firm with the higher advertising spillover effect is more likely to attract consumers, reducing marginal costs. Therefore, a firm should either diversify its advertisements or invest only in the one with the highest advertising spillover effect. The shooting method converges well and the numerical solution indicates that our model has a unique saddle point equilibrium.

Social media has brought to light the role of authenticity in influencing decision-making, but little work has examined specific authenticity cues that might impact purchase. In other words, does authenticity influence consumer actions? In this paper, we examine an e-commerce platform that leverages influencers to sell beauty products, and examine how two authenticity cues – explicit transparency (#ad) and implicit authenticity (photo originality) – impact purchase decisions. We draw from expectation-confirmation theory and suggest that the impact that perceived authenticity has on purchase decisions and post-purchase satisfaction depends on the type of authenticity cue and is shaped by the expectation of the consumer. We further argue that expectations vary depending on the consumer experience with an influencer and therefore explore the moderation effect of customer loyalty. Our findings suggest that consumers have different reactions depending on the authenticity cues – their purchase probability decreases with transparency but increases with photo originality. We see that with greater loyalty, consumers are more negatively impacted by the #ad tag and are less positively influenced by the originality of the photo. On the other hand, purchase depth—loyalty to one influencer—mitigates the negative effect of the #ad tag and heightens the positive impact of photo originality. We suggest that experience with the influencer provides evidence that the higher the expectation for authenticity (depth) the higher the negative impact of in-authenticity. We also discuss limitations and implications of our work.

Shopping is the process of purchasing the needs from the Grocery stores and Shopping Carts are useful for humongous offline purchases done by customers. These days online shopping is on trend. So People are always motivated to purchase their needs directly from grocery stores and get them without any time delay. Here, we come up to make their shopping more convenient by turning the simple shopping cart into a smart cart. In this paper Gestures based shopping cart is going to be an encouragement in the field of supermarkets. A customer need to purchase their groceries in the supermarket. When we go to the supermarket, we need to spend time locating the product and also it seems to be hectic to stand in a queue for billing and payment. Here, we have proposed to develop a smart trolley which is improvised by automated moving, automated bill generator with payment options and locate items easily using a map. Gestures, Display, Image Processing & Motion Detection are the concepts under Gestures based shopping cart.

This paper investigates the role, if any, played by the social media platform Reddit, in the events around the GameStop short squeeze in early 2021. In particular, we analyse the impact of discussions on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit on the price dynamics of the American online retailer GameStop. We perform textual analysis on 10.8m comments and surface the relationships between the comment sentiments and 1-min GameStop returns. Results indicate that both tone and number of comments influence GME intraday returns. Sentiments extracted from longer threads have a greater influence. Fear is the dominant sentiment in all comments, while comments that express a Sad sentiment show the most significant impact. While investors may just like the stock, it appears that fear and loathing also are important.

At the heart of the legal battle between Epic Games and Apple is a set of restrictions Apple imposes on app developers. For instance, Apple prohibits the distribution of iOS apps outside of the App Store, which Apple fully controls. Apple similarly requires developers to exclusively use its own in-app payment system for app purchases and in-app purchases for digital content. Through this system, Apple automatically collects a 30% commission on all such transactions. Dissatisfied with these policies, Epic Games tried to use its flagship game Fortnite as leverage to convince Apple to open up its closed platform. After Apple refused, Epic Games violated the App Store rules by enabling its own payment method in the Fortnite iOS app on August 13, 2020. That same day, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store and Epic Games filed an antitrust suit in a federal district court in California. Apple soon thereafter countersued for breach of contract. A yearlong trial ensued, the result of which is a 185-page decision, which was handed down by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on September 10, 2021. This summary condenses the Epic Games v. Apple decision into a six-page overview covering all the main parts of the decision. Part I of the summary covers the findings of fact, which includes the Court’s factual findings on the different product and geographic markets proposed by Epic Games and Apple, on the anticompetitive effects alleged by Epic Games, and on the business justifications put forward by Apple. Part II covers the application of the facts to the law and includes the Court’s legal market definition and market power assessment, its findings under federal antitrust law (Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act) and state antitrust law (California’s Cartwright Act and Unfair Competition Law), and its breach of contract findings.

For the past many decades, television news channel have been the best source of information –cum –entertainment to sit among the family and enjoy hours of relaxation. Nowadays people don’t prefer to watch news channels as they have opinion that these days the news channels have become boring. As a result, TV News programme in terms audience reach and significantly to public discourse can rightly be said that the term ‘Infotainment’ is a new concept for a developing country. It refers to a mixed bag if styles, formats and sub-genres and its distinguished feature is that it falls somewhere in the space between the two traditional pillars of television i.e, Information and Entertainment. The main problem of traditional account of journalism is the audience no longer find it as important and sustaining as they once did. News and current affair are moving study aims to find out preferences of information format of TV News programmes by the audience as well as to analyze the information format of TV Programmes used by the channels.

Contests that non-contestants consume for entertainment are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. We look to professional sports and exploit injury-induced changes to teams' line-ups to examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have more uncertain outcomes. Using data from the Australian Football League, we fi nd that a one standard-deviation increase in game outcome uncertainty causes, on average, an 11.2% increase in attendance. Our results extend research on contest design and information preferences by showing that spectators strongly prefer evenly-balanced contests and appear to derive entertainment utility from suspense and the resolution of uncertainty.

The role, informative or persuasive, of brand names in driving purchasing decisions is very much under debate. We exploit the rebranding of a mortgage lender to analyse households’ choice behaviour in response to brand popularity. Loan-level data on new mortgages suggest that (1) brand awareness reduces the equilibrium price of residential mortgage contracts and (2) the reduction mainly reflects consumers’ selection of cheaper products due to better information. Our calibrated model implies an overall gain equal to 6 per cent of the initial loan amount and a roughly 10 percentage point increase in the share of households that shift to cheaper lenders.

This paper argues, in the context of targeted advertising, that receivers' rational inattention and ability to independently acquire information have a non-trivial impact on the sender's optimal disclosure strategy. In our model, a monopolist has an opportunity to launch an advertising campaign and chooses a targeting strategy -- which consumers to send its advertisement to. The consumers are uncertain about and heterogeneous in their valuations of the product, and are rationally inattentive in that they must incur a cost if they want to learn their true valuations. We discover that the firm generally prefers to target consumers who are either indifferent between ignoring and investigating the product, or between investigating and buying it unconditionally. If the firm is uncertain about the consumer appeal of its product, it targets these two distinct groups of consumers simultaneously but may ignore all consumers in between.

Overview: A field experiment isolates the downstream effects of being mobilized to vote in a ranked choice vote (RCV) election. After people are mobilized to vote in their first RCV election, they report more positive evaluations of RCV across multiple dimensions. Abstract: Ranked choice voting (RCV) is an alternative method of electing single member districts that eliminates the spoiler effect, encourages collaborative campaigns, and guarantees a majority winner. Some worry that voters might find RCV to be confusing and intimidating. Others applaud RCV for producing better campaigns. What do the voters think? And does the experience of voting in a ranked choice vote election change the way people view RCV? This study combines a panel survey conducted before and after an RCV election with an intensive mobilization treatment that encourages voting in the same RCV election. The analysis leverages the mobilization treatment as an instrumental variable, creating an opportunity to isolate and estimate the effects of exogenously-driven increases in voter turnout. The results find that when people are mobilized to vote in their first RCV election, their positive evaluations of RCV increase across multiple dimensions - including reports about how easy RCV is to understand, the quality of campaigns, the quality of candidates and vote choice, and perceptions about RCV’s effect on fairness and corruption. Exploratory analyses find that the effects of voting in an RCV election on positive evaluations of RCV are largely consistent across different demographic groups. As more cities in America transition to ranked choice voting over time, more Americans will continue to be exposed to this alternative to plurality rule. This study suggests that citizens’ evaluations of RCV will grow stronger after they experience voting in RCV elections.

We evaluate whether and how branded TV product placement affects sales for cigarette brands. We use data on product placement from TV shows and data on retail sales of cigarettes to estimate a demand model that incorporates the level of product placement exposure for each cigarette brand. We find that product placement has a small yet positive and statistically significant effect on both own-brand sales and competitor-brand sales: both of these elasticities are roughly 0.02. These results indicate that cigarette product placement affects demand for individual cigarette brands and that it also leads to greater overall cigarette use. This issue is of particular importance to policymakers because product placement is one of the few remaining ways that cigarette brands can reach a mass audience. To illustrate how these results could be used by policymakers, we use our model estimates to evaluate how cigarette sales would be affected by two hypothetical kinds of regulations. Limiting brands’ ability to be displayed on TV and forcing TV networks to instead use generic, unbranded cigarettes on screen would only reduce cigarette sales by about 2 percent, while forcing TV networks to eliminate all on-screen smoking activity would reduce cigarette sales by about 7 percent.

Using the positive shift in tone of Fox News coverage of macroeconomic news after the Republican Bush election in 2000, we investigate whether media slant influences the investment decisions of short sellers. We find that firms headquartered in Republican-leaning townships with Fox News availability experienced a relative decrease in short interest post the 2000 election. We further find that the relative decrease is more pronounced for firms that are more subject to investors’ home bias. We interpret our findings to suggest that short sellers, as sophisticated as they may be, are not immune to the slant in media coverage.

With the rapid development of mobile technology and consumers’ increasing demand for portability, the mobile gaming market has experienced huge growth. To ensure the success of mobile games, game publishers need to keep their players engaged and, at the same time, seek monetization strategies that do not interrupt players’ engagement. Reward ads, a relatively new and increasingly popular in-app advertising monetization model in which players can voluntarily watch an ad in exchange for a reward within the game, can help publishers generate revenue without breaking the flow of the game. This paper builds a Hidden Markov Model to examine how players’ intrinsic motivation factors and reward ads affect mobile game players' dynamic engagement state evolution. Using detailed tapstream data from a mobile game app, we find that player's engagement transition is a complex process, and players in high, medium, or low engagement states respond differently to different factors. First, watching reward ads can help players to transition to a higher engagement level, and the magnitude of the positive effect diminishes as players transition to higher engagement states. Second, there is an inverted-U shape between the fluctuation of the perceived difficulty and the propensity of moving to or staying at a higher engagement level. Third, the perceived difficulty is helpful for players who are in a low or high engagement state, and a feeling of achievement has a positive effect on players in all states. Finally, players in a low engagement level are more likely to watch reward ads compared with players in a medium engagement level, and players are more likely to watch reward ads when games become difficult. The findings enhance the understanding of players' engagement and motivations to play mobile games and provide design guidance for mobile game publishers.

In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Why did people comply, or not, while shopping in 2020? Do these motivations relate to their shopping behaviors? Based on the recent literature on mask-wearing, we define three customer groups: Self-Protectors wear a mask primarily because they are sensitive to their own health risk, while Social-Signalers wear a mask primarily to signal social responsibility; meanwhile, Insensitive-Shoppers do not wear a mask. We collected four months of shopping videos in 2020 in a department store where mask-wearing was not mandated, and we determined each customer’s group from their mask-wearing choice and shopping duration. We found significant differences in the purchased items—e.g., Self-Protectors bought more healthy products and explored less variety, while Social-Signalers bought fewer popular products and more hedonic products. We trained a multi-class tree-classification model on the sales data and achieved a high prediction accuracy of 84% on a hold-out sample. This research has managerial implications for customer segmentation and targeting as well as social implications for messaging to encourage public mask-wearing.

Companies in their groth policies have many choicies depending on their availalble resources. In this paper, Amazon. In fact, Amazon’s desire is to be a bigger player in Hollywood could involve the acquisition of the American company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The ongoing discussions between the tech giant and the historic film and television studio explains Amazon strategic move to acquire a company specialised in a domain which is not Amazon main area of expertise; a sector that could increases Amazon revenues in the future. Amazon has already established itself as a significant entertainment force with content it creates and acquires through Amazon Studios and that it broadcasts via its Prime Video streaming service. Metro Goldwyn Mayer would bring with it a major film library, which includes the James Bond franchise, as well as television shows such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Fargo,” and reality shows such as “Shark Tank” and “Survivor,” a potential deal at between $7 billion and $10 billion. To be ready for the move, Amazon is shaving more than 200 million Prime members worldwide with 175 million of Prime Video content. Amazon wants to turn Prime Video into an even bigger habit for customers worldwide, and a quick way to do that would be to stir MGM’s extensive library of titles into the mix. It is not a secret that other tech and media giants have been sniffing around MGM for some time. The Technology giant prepared the move by tapping Jeff Blackburn, a former high-ranking executive who recently exited the ecommerce giant, to return to Amazon in a new role overseeing a consolidated global media and entertainment group. In fine, the sale of MGM to Amazon could signal the tech company's move to expand its Amazon Prime streaming inventory to include MGM's extensive array of big-name movies and TV shows. These include the James Bond, Hobbit, Rocky, and Pink Panther franchises alongside "Legally Blonde" and "A Star Is Born." Based on professor Alain Ndedi researches in intrapreneurship and strategic management, and Professor Philip Kotler insights in strategic marketing, this article demonstrates how a strategic diversification through acquisition by Amazon to acquire Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) could be a strategic move for Amazon strategic growth.

Advertising – ‘commercial speech’ – is a form of communication which brings considerable benefits to the economy and society, and restrictions on it need clear justification. Until the mid-1950s advertising was for the most part unregulated, subject only to laws relating to fraud and defamation which also affect other forms of speech. Since then, direct government restrictions have grown, and are still growing, in an attempt to serve public policy objectives of one kind or another. Some of these interventions may achieve little gain at excessive cost, but at least they are discussed in Parliament. However, many restrictions come from what is ostensibly industry self-regulation by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), a private body which has morphed from concern with ensuring that advertising is ‘legal, decent, honest and truthful’ to a much wider and more problematic brief. Today the ASA does not simply respond to complaints; it proactively seeks out breaches of its own rules. Moreover it deliberately attempts to change public attitudes through forbidding representation of certain types of otherwise lawful behaviour which may give offence to some groups. The ASA is an unrepresentative body which imposes its own attitudes on the advertising industry and thus on the general public. Its interpretation of ‘offence’ and ‘harm’ appears to differ from the view taken by others concerned with regulatory issues, such as Ofcom and Clearcast. As a consequence, creative expression which is permissible in television and films, YouTube, the theatre, books and newspapers is in effect forbidden in advertising. Rules are continually being expanded to cover more areas of our society and culture, and the ASA recently argued that even political manifestos should be regulated. We should reflect much more carefully on the often unthinking way in which we have acquiesced in restrictions on commercial speech while permitting similar material under the banner of entertainment or intellectual free speech. As Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase discerned, the case for free speech is indivisible. If certain types of speech and imagery are forbidden in advertising, it may not be long before there will be pressure to forbid them in the arts, entertainment and politics.

COJO for COVID Recovery is a UKRI/AHRC-funded rapid COVID-19 response research project that addresses the role that constructive journalism (COJO), particularly solution-focused journalism, can play in the pandemic recovery. The research set out in this report details the findings of the project’s initial in-depth interviews and survey with UK news audiences. Four key sets of findings regarding COVID-19 news consumption and experience emerge from this analysis. 1. The high interest in COVID-19 news was associated with the need to monitor and navigate the uncertain evolution of the pandemic as it affected audiences. 2. There was a clear fluctuation that followed “an inverse Bell curve” (up-down-up) pattern of COVID-19 news consumption which was in parallel with the severity of the pandemic and its associated lockdown restrictions. 3. Many of our participants reported switching off from the news or avoiding it for reasons linked to mental and emotional health, including negativity, repetitive reporting and information overload. 4. Participants demanded the media provide more positive news that helps to lift the mood of the public and/or offers ways out of the pandemic.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of visual technology on the price discovery process in listings of residential properties in Singapore from 2015 to 2018. Design/methodology/approach The authors empirically model the effects of 360 virtual tours and drone video on four dimensions in price discovery – buyers’ arrival rate, sale probability, transaction prices and time-on-market – using a comprehensive data set for the residential properties in Singapore. Findings The analysis shows that the availability of virtual tours or drone video in a listing increases the arrival rate from potential buyers, the probability of a successful sale and the selling price. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that technologically enhanced tools improve the quality of information and the marketability of property. However, listings with virtual tours tend to be associated with longer marketing time, which is consistent with the prediction of the information overload hypothesis. Research limitations/implications This paper extends the housing and price discovery literature by examining how technologically enabled new information affects property transactions. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to consider the impact of drone video on property market outcome.

The main concern of the study was to identify the positive and negative effects of using social media in communicating with their OFW families as perceived by students. This study was conducted at the Central Luzon State University, Science of Munoz, the Philippines using descriptive research design. The study used the purposive sampling method. The researcher determined that most College students have an internet connection by using wi-fi. Facebook was the social media they always used when they go online. They go online every day and spent more than 1 hour and a maximum of 3 hours a day. But they only communicate to their OFW family once a week even they go online every day. Most of them have parents abroad and a few of them have aunt and uncle. When they communicating with their parents they usually talk about financial concerns like allowance and tuition fees and also about grades. The majority of them were always using Facebook because it was the most popular site on the internet also it has a chat feature that most students used to communicate with their distant family. Also, the channels used to communicate with their family through phone calls. However, using social media sites in terms of communicating with their distant families also has a strength, and students were highly strongly agreed that the strength of social media they used was easy phone access. Also, the social media site they are using has weaknesses. These are “misunderstand tone” and it was hard to use. In using social media site it can give positive effect to the respondents because they can connect with other family members who are far from home, and it can be a source of information. But also every social media site has a negative effect on the users because their communication was lack emotional connection. In this study, the hypothesis was rejected generally that there is no relationship between the social media extent exposure and the positive and negative effects of social media to respondents.

Inspired by the popularity of the advertising model at search engines, many online retailing platforms have added a new revenue stream of advertising (i.e., sponsored ads) to their traditional commission-based business model. While this new hybrid model is intuitively appealing, questions on its relative value to the traditional commission-based model have not been carefully examined. In practice, despite being embraced by top retailing platforms, sponsored ads are still quite rare among the majority of e-commerce platforms. It is of both theoretical and practical interest to examine whether adding sponsored ads is always economically attractive to retailing platforms. Toward this goal, we study the merits of the hybrid model relative to the traditional commission-based model by incorporating consumer search behavior, product characteristics, and seller bid behavior. We find that, while the hybrid model often weakly dominates the commission model, strict dominance only occurs in specific settings. A key reason is the substitution effect between the commission and advertising income. Furthermore, we show that the reverse - the commission model strictly dominates - can happen, depending on consumers' search costs and sellers' placement. Our findings suggest that platforms should carefully examine their seller and consumer profiles before implementing the advertising service.

Influencer Marketing is one of the company's digital communication tools and is the promotion of products through influential names in digital media. The influencer endorsement in product promotion and brand communication has recently increased as a result of technological development and digitalization. The main purpose of the influencer endorsement in promotion is to be the product recommended by the people that consumers trust and thus increase both brand awareness and sales. In this situation, another concept that emerged with the concept of Influencer marketing is trust. Although it is confirmed in the literature that trust to celebrities or branded persons, brand trust concept should also be considered. In this context, the mediation of brand trust in the effect of influencer endorsement on purchase intention was investigated. After eliminating incorrectly filled and blank questionnaires, 316 questionnaires remained. The influencers and the products they introduced were selected through these surveys and the analysis was started. The population of the research is Azerbaijani citizens who have active accounts in at least one social network. The structural equation model was used in the study. According to the findings, social media influencers have impacts on purchase intention. It has also been confirmed that the expertise and attractiveness of the influencers are more accepted in the Azerbaijani society and brand trust creates a mediator effect in this relationship.

We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians’ selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians’ revealed preferences over news items. We apply our measure to twelve major German media outlets by analyzing tweets of German Members of Parliament (MPs) on Twitter. For each news outlet under consideration, we compute the correlation between the political position of the seven parties in the 19th German Bundestag and their MPs’ relative number of Twitter referrals to that outlet. We find that three outlets are positioned on the left, and two of them are positioned on the right. Several robustness checks support our results. We also apply our procedure to nine major media outlets from the USA and find that two outlets are positioned on the right, five are positioned on the left of the political spectrum.

Influencer marketing has been growing rapidly on social media, such that the influencer marketing industry is now worth $15 billion. As more consumers are eager to rely on influencers’ recommendations for shopping, the trustworthiness of influencers’ opinions becomes a key question. Specifically, consumers increasingly question the honesty of influencer opinions when influencers advertise sponsored products from brands. To help consumers make informed shopping decisions, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s endorsement guidelines require influencers to disclose sponsorship. However, little is known about how influencers respond to the FTC’s endorsement guidelines. In this paper, we study how influencers change their content delivery strategies upon sponsorship and how these strategies affect consumer sentiment. Employing both the Instrumental Variable (IV), and Regression Discontinuity (RD) identification strategies, we find that influencers choose a soft selling strategy and tone down their voice loudness significantly in sponsored videos. This voice modulation strategy can help influencers win back favorable consumer sentiment. Above all, influencers who are more popular (have more view counts) are more likely to modulate their voice in their favor. We discuss implications for the four stakeholders: the FTC, brands, influencers, and consumers.

Social networking sites (SNS) are a growing marketing tool used in advertisement and marketing activities. Companies have invested a lot in the fields of social media advertising through SNS. Yet, the challenge companies face is how they can efficiently advertise their social media advertisements and increase customer purchase intention. This study aims to explore and verify key interaction elements within SNS communities that are associated with purchase intention. This study includes predictors, such as emotional value and informativeness, privacy concerns, advertising value, community commitment, community satisfaction to predict consumer purchase intention. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to a sample of 480 social media users. Results reveal that SNS predictors positively impact purchase intentions. Interestingly, results show partial mediation of community commitment and community satisfaction on the relationship between SNS interaction factors and purchase intention and no mediation of advertising value between informativeness and purchase intention.

Online Product Recommendation (OPR) systems offered by Ecommerce website are crucial in providing real-time product recommendations based on customers’ past behavior and references, contributing a significant impact on increasing purchasers’ satisfaction, boosting websites’ revenue through up-selling or cross-selling, and settling a long-term relationship between websites and customers. This research model was developed to investigate how positive and negative characteristics of OPR’s quality influence purchasers’ decision-making process and their time spent while surfing E-commerce websites, and how these two factors conclusively affect customer loyalty. The results point out that customer loyalty is significantly influenced by decision making quality and is negatively affected by customer time wasted. There are positive relationships between Content relevance, vividness and the DMQ; positive association between deceptiveness, information overload and customer time wasted. The results of this research can be utilized by E-commerce websites to optimize their Product Recommendation system to gain more customer loyalty and be a strong player in the market

This paper uses revealed preference methods to estimate demand for non-instrumental information in entertainment. I do this by examining the "thrill" associated with the trajectory of an event, which includes both suspense and surprise, and the "skill" of performers in an event. I apply the theory presented in Ely et al. (2015) to conduct an empirical analysis that examines the effect of thrill on consumer attention. I extend the Ely et al. (2015) framework by examining spectator preferences for characteristics of the performers themselves, which I call "skill." I use game-specific, high-temporal frequency television ratings data from the National Basketball Association (NBA) to measure spectator responses to skill and thrill. First, I find that a doubling of skill present in a game leads to an approximately 11% increase in initial viewer turnout, while the expected thrill of a game has no statistically significant impact. Next, I show that thrill during a game increases viewership by 7-30%, while a doubling of skill on the court during a specific portion of a game leads to a 1.9-2.4% increase in viewership, depending on specification. Interestingly, I find a negative interactive effect between suspense and skill, suggesting that heightened suspense leads to differentially higher viewership with lower skill on the court. The findings suggest that skill of information-conveying agents primarily impacts viewership on the extensive margin (across games), while thrill is highly time-dependent and primarily impacts viewership on the intensive margin (within games). These findings have important implications for entertainment media companies, including leagues and television broadcasters, and advertisers.

People nowadays are very health conscious and they started using environmentally friendly and natural products in their everyday lives. Organic personal care products are becoming very popular, and they occupy a strong market place.The purpose of this study is to identify the preference and satisfaction of consumers’ towards organic personal care brands consumers towards green products at Chennai city, Tamil Nadu. The study was analytical in nature. The target population of the study consists of consumer of organic personal care brands at Chennai city. The sample size of the study was 100 consumers. Judgment sampling technique has been used to collect data from the consumers. The data were collected by using primary and secondary data source. The questionnaire consisted with three dimensions namely socio-economic factors of the consumers, consumers’ preference on organic personal care brands and consumers’ satisfaction on organic personal care brands. The questionnaire was developed by using a five point Likert scale. The secondary data were collected from related articles, journals, thesis, books, newspapers and internet, etc. To analyze the data the statistical measures namely reliability, descriptive statistics, chi-square, correlation and Friedman test were used. The study found that that there is a significant and positive relationship between consumer preference and satisfaction towards organic personal care products at Chennai city. Conclusions as well as suggestions were discussed

The use of social media and instant messaging such as Facebook and Instagram and instant messaging, such as WhatsApp, for e-commerce are growing in average by 65%, and marketplace growth by 10% from 2018 to 2020. In contrast, the growth company website as a sales media declined from 10% in 2018 to 5% in 2019. The main factors that influenced the website low usage are ease of use, and secure payment. Little has been known about the moderating effect of the perceived security of mobile payment in the relationship between intention to use and actual website usage. The objective of the study is to investigate the most important features, and analyze the moderating effect of perceived security mobile payment in the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The population observed is the online shopper in Greater Jakarta Area, using purposive sampling. The sample size was 114 collected during the period of May to June 2021. The data was analyzed using SPSS v25 and Smart PLS3. The result showed that Perceived Security Mobile Payment moderate the relationship between intention to use the website and actual usage of website. The finding contributes to TAM model literature with the moderator variable of Perceived Security of Mobile payment. The practical implication of the study is on the manager to consider mobile payment as an option of method payment, and to manage the features in the websites that can increase Perceived Ease of Use of the online shopper, such as product related features and delivery tracking status.

Privacy protection measures in online markets have ramped up in recent years, typified by both government initiatives, as well as firm-level actions such as designing web browsers which block “third-party cookies” by default. We estimate a structural model of auctions in online advertising using bid-level auction data from Yahoo. Then we simulate several counterfactual scenarios, focusing on evaluating the likely effects of Google’s announced plan, starting in 2023, to block third-party cookies by default on Chrome, its market-leading browser. We find that such a ban would reduce publisher revenue by 45%, and bidder (advertiser) surplus by 35%. Moreover, our simulations also indicate that, amidst a third-party cookie ban, bidders who are able to leverage their informational advantage on users can gain surplus from the ban.

The emergence of digital markets and the increasing speed of its development have raised the question, whether existing competition rules are fit for the digital era. The three famous abuse decisions of the European Commission on Google (namely Google Search (Shopping), Google AdSense and Google Android) show that complicated technical processes open up many possibilities for results-oriented decision-making. This is also evident in the light of decisions by American, German and French competition authorities on similar issues. Google's business model, relying on a broad network, usually free of charge for consumers, is a good way of illustrating the special features of the online world. The European Commission's Google Search decision and Google AdSense decision demonstrate how quickly the relevant markets in the digital field can change. This will clearly show the possibilities for market definition offered by the technical intricacies. The European Commission´s Google Android decision illustrates the consequences of a technically understandable but otherwise rather questionable decision. German Bundeskartellamt´s VG Media decision as well as French Autorite de la concurrence´s Syndicat des editeurs de la presse magazine decision and Gibmedia decision show differences and similarities within the EU regarding the definition of relevant markets.

This study looks at Advertising of indigenous herbal products using Swedru Municipality as a case study. The research was designed to examine the extent to which advertising tools are used to reach consumers with herbal products and how consumers respond to these tools. Qualitative content analysis was employed for the study. The Methodology for the study dealt with the sample chosen and the research instruments used. A sample of thirty-two (32) respondents was chosen for the study. In-depth interviews and documents were the research instruments used. Based on the outlined objectives, it was found out that advertisement is one of the major communication tools that can influence the buying attitudes of consumers. The study was able to establish that advertisements of herbal products should be done frequently with appropriate advertising tools and persuasive messages for the fact that it draws consumers’ attention to the products, thereby giving market power to the firm. It is therefore very important for the herbal firm to fully focus on effective advertising tools like radio, television, outdoor and other traditional forms to advertise the herbal products because advertising is a powerful means for creating awareness and positive perception in the minds of consumers.

We examine an international sample of 68,044 completed, or envisaged but abandoned, M&A transactions involving unlisted targets to determine the effect of rumors on deal-closing propensity and transaction value. Our focus on non-listed targets leaves only two reasons for the emergence of M&A transaction information leaks. First, a rumor may arise unintentionally due to carelessness in the negotiation process. Second, someone may spread a rumor on purpose to affect the likelihood of transaction closing and deal value. As an extension of the material presented in the published paper, this accompanying Online Appendix shows the impact of unintentional rumors is less pronounced than intentional rumors, and the effects of both types are consistent with the evidence presented in the main body of the published paper.

Today, many platforms host user-generated content (UGC) and content by professionals side by side. However, behavior of UGC and professionals is mostly studied in isolation. In this paper, we study the spillover effects from UGC on content from professionals in the context of the news industry. We use an exogenous shock to the supply of UGC to identify spillover effects on the output of professionals as well as the implications for the business model of online platforms. Using data from a network of 122 local news outlets hosted by an online news platform, we find that in response to the reduction in the supply of user-generated news, which mainly is driven by reduced output from experienced users, inexperienced professionals significantly increase their output. However, we find a decrease in overall content on the platform, one which is especially pronounced for local news. We further show that this likely has detrimental effects on the business model of the online platform, with a decrease in viewership and articles and an increase in the quantity of content by professionals, who are paid by the platform. Thus, our work contributes to the literature of UGC and online platforms, as well as the literature on local news.

Uncertain situation during pandemic in its initial stage generated negative, positive, and neutral sentiments in online and social media. This research aimed to describe public initial response to Indonesian Government’s health crisis communication in handling COVID-19 Pandemic. This research utilized a big data analysis of data collected from March 2, 2020 to April 7, 2020. A total of 23,229 conversations were recorded consisting of 8,855 on the website, 1,584 on Facebook, 2,904 on Youtube, and 9,886 on Twitter. This analysis shows that in the first two weeks, the discussion about the Corona virus issue was not too massive albeit its negative tones. The third and fourth weeks of talk about Corona were much more pervasive with varied tones: positive, negative, and neutral. The coverage on the news website is much more positive than the responses on Facebook and YouTube, in which the latter held the most negative tones. The increasing number of responses on the website was triggered by the government’s announcement of a National Emergency situation on 30 March 2020. This illustrates that the public needed certainty of information from the government. When information and news were positive or full of optimism, positive responses sentiment would also occur on social media and on website news. This study concluded that public response toward the pandemic issue was previously done mostly on social media towards website platform with many trusted news portals. The topics and words changed from health topics to government policies against the Corona outbreak.

This research was conducted to analyze and know the influence of Online Customer Reviews, Influencer Marketing, Website Quality, on Online Purchasing Decisions at Shopee's Online Marketplace. The analytical method used in this research is descriptive analysis and multiple linear regression analysis. This type of research is associative research and the data used are primary data obtained with a list of questions whose measurements use an interval scale. Hypothesis testing is done using SPSS. The results of the research conducted indicate that simultaneously the variables Online Customer Review, Influencer Marketing, Quality Website have a significant effect on Purchasing Decisions Online on the Online Marketplace Shopee. However, partially it is known that in the results of the above research it is known that the coefficient value of the Online Customer Review variable 0.196 is negative with T count (1.742).

In its Proposal for a Digital Services Act (“DSA”), the European Commission highlighted the need for new transparency obligations to arrive at accountable digital services, ensure a fair environment for economic operators and empower consumers. However, the proposed new rules seem to focus on transparency measures for consumers. According to the DSA Proposal, platforms, such as online marketplaces, must ensure that platform users receive information enabling them to understand when and on whose behalf an advertisement is displayed, and which parameters are used to direct advertising to them, including explanations of the logic underlying systems for targeted advertising. Statements addressing the interests of trademark owners and trademark policy are sought in vain. Against this background, the analysis sheds light on AI-driven behavioural advertising practices and the policy considerations underlying the proposed new transparency obligations. In the light of the debate on trademark protection in keyword advertising cases, it will show that not only consumers but also trademark owners have a legitimate interest in receiving information on the parameters that are used to target consumers. The discussion will lead to the insight that lessons from the keyword advertising debate can play an important role in the transparency discourse because they broaden the spectrum of policy rationales and guidelines for new transparency rules. In addition to the current focus on consumer empowerment, the enhancement of information on alternative offers in the marketplace and the strengthening of trust in AI-driven, personalized advertising enter the picture. On balance, there are good reasons to broaden the scope of the DSA initiative and ensure access to transparency information for consumers and trademark owners alike.

Consumers use social media to create content, generate online word-of-mouth, and communicate with brands and other consumers. Consumers engage with influencers who deliver content that is timely, entertaining, and interesting to them. Many influencers have a truly global following across the world. However, there is little research on international aspects of social media influencers. Our paper leverages Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to study consumer engagement using a novel dataset of global sustainability influencers. Our results indicate that the cultural distance between the influencer and the followers is an important driver of engagement in a nuanced way. While the level of superficial, light engagement is not affected by the cultural distance between an influencer and her followers, the level of deep engagement increases when an influencer and her followers are culturally close. The effect is more pronounced for followers in countries where environmental concerns are considered more important.

The news industry in the United States faces a funding crisis because the tech giants, particularly Google and Facebook, have acceded to the advertising monopolies once enjoyed by the newspaper industry itself. Despite the best efforts of the news industry to paint the tech giants as rapacious monopolists, however, these big firms won by offering better services to users and better advertising opportunities to advertisers, so breakup is not appropriate, and is unlikely to restore the news industry’s profits anyway, because search and social media will remain better ad distribution channels than the news. A better solution to the funding crisis would be for government to divide the advertising distribution market, reallocating to the news industry some of the ad impressions taken from it by the tech giants. This indirect, property-rights-based approach to government subsidization would address concerns, however misguided, that direct subsidization a la the BBC might lead to political interference in newsgathering. An important collateral benefit would be the opportunity to limit the total amount of advertising consumed by the economy, by licensing fewer total ad impressions than are currently consumed. This would lead to an efficiency gain because advertising’s information function has withered in the information age, making advertising almost entirely manipulative in character, and therefore a threat to consumer sovereignty. Ad distribution revenues would not fall, however, because advertising cancels—firms advertise because others advertise, not because advertising increases sales—and so firms will bid up prices in proportion to the decline in available impressions. The proposed division and reduction of the advertising market would be constitutional because the purpose of First Amendment commercial speech doctrine is to protect consumer sovereignty, and restrictions on advertising that has become almost entirely manipulative in the information age do that.

Advertising affects not only the firm that advertises, but also the platform that hosts the advertisement. Using data from a field experiment at an e-commerce platform, I demonstrate that the effects on the advertising firm and the hosting platform can differ sharply. The experiment blocks all sponsored search advertising for a small fraction of site visitors. Compared to users who are shielded from ads, users who see ads spend significantly more on sponsored listings and significantly less on organic listings. The second effect dominates, revealing that on net, sponsored search reduces total sales on the platform. Using a separate natural experiment, I also find evidence that sponsored search puts upward pressure on prices, which can exacerbate cannibalization. Together, these findings illustrate the cost of advertising from the perspective of the platform.

This study aims to determine the effect of brand image, features, and price perceptions on purchasing decisions for OPPO smartphones, a case study of students of the Faculty of Economics, Jakarta State University, Class of 2018-2020. From data analysis obtained multiple linear regression equation with the formula Y = 3.379 + 0.206 X1 + 0.465 X2 + 0.376 X3. From the t test, it can be explained that the brand image, features, and price perceptions have a significant effect on purchasing decisions with each independent variable having a value of t count> 1.985. From the f test it can be explained that the brand image, features, and price perceptions have a significant effect on purchasing decisions with the results of the simultaneous f test of 38.204 whose value exceeds f table 2.47. From the analysis of the coefficient of determination, it can be explained that brand image, features, and price perceptions have a significant effect on purchasing decisions by 53% while the remaining 47% is influenced by other variables outside of this research model.

The era of information disruption has made major changes in collecting, processing, and utilizing information in general. Most people have switched to carry out their activities from the real to the virtual world. It cannot be separated from the emergence of digital technology in all community activities. This paper aims to describe what regencies or cities in Bali will detail media Balinese people most trust. This paper will also provide information about social media ownership to know to margin the mapping of people's habits through the media they use based on the age, education level, and regencies or cities in Bali. This paper uses a survey method for the 1.540 Balinese people spread over all nine districts/cities in Bali, using multi-stage sampling with an error of 2,5%. It shows differences in social media platforms based on age, educational background, and the regencies they live. Even though there are differences in media habits, the most trusted media for them is news from mainstream media like television and newspaper. Still, in groupage 17-25 years, there is increasing trust in media online.