Marketing and politics: Models, behavior, and policy implications

The American presidential election is one of the largest, most expensive, and most comprehensive marketing efforts. Despite this fact, marketing scholars have largely ignored this campaign, as well as thousands of others for congresspersons, senators, and governors. This article describes the growth of interest in research issues related to political marketing. This emerging research area lies at the crossroads of marketing and political science, but these fields have developed largely independent of one another with little cross-fertilization of ideas. We discuss recent theoretical, empirical, and behavioral work on political campaigns, integrating perspectives from marketing and political science. Our focus is on (1) the extent to which paradigms used in goods and services marketing carry over to the institutional setting of political campaigns, (2) what changes are necessary in models and methodology to understand issues in political marketing and voter behavior, and (3) how the special setting of politics may help us gain a better understanding of certain topics central to marketing such as advertising, branding, and social networks.     

Factors associated with landowner involvement in forest conservation programs in the U.S.: Implications for policy design and outreach

One-third of the forestland in the U.S. is owned by 10.4 million family forest owners. Their collective decisions have a great impact on the sustainability of forest landscape across the country. Public policies and programs for encouraging landowners to properly manage their land include cost-share, forest certification, and conservation easements. However, to date, less than 6% of the family forest owners have participated in a cost-share program, less than 1% have certified their land, and less than 2% have an easement. By analyzing data from USDA Forest Service's National Woodland Owner Survey, we examined the characteristics of family forest owners who had participated in these programs and identified strategies to capitalize on these landowner characteristics to improve current programs and attract a wider range of participants. We found that family forest owners with larger land holdings were more likely to participate in all three types of programs. Obtaining forest management information or advice was important for program participation; however, the effects differed depending on the types of programs and the sources of information. Income was not significant in predicting participation in cost-share programs, implying family forest owners from lower-income strata were not more likely to use cost-share program. The results also suggest the importance of targeting the right audience when promoting forest certification programs, namely those who are participants of cost-share programs, own forestland for reasons other than farming or ranching, and plan to harvest sawlogs or pulpwood in the future. Age was not significant in any of the empirical models. This result is particularly intriguing in the context of conservation easement, considering recent discussions about the high cost of dying unprepared and the potential for promoting conservation easement as part of estate planning among older family forest owners. Finally, few variables were significant in the model predicting landowner decision about donating or selling an easement, suggesting the easement decision is very different from cost-share and forest certification decisions and further efforts are needed to understand the dynamics of this increasingly popular conservation policy tool. In summary, this study provides a better understanding of the relationship between program participation and the demographics, attitudes and behaviors of family forest owners. This understanding contributes to the development of outreach strategies for improving landowner interest in forest conservation programs.     

Back to Basics: Forecasting the Revenues of Internet Firms

This paper examines the roles played by past revenues, web usage data, and analysts in forecasting the future revenues of internet firms during the years 1998 to 2000. For this time period our analysis shows that estimates of web traffic growth have significant incremental value in the prediction of revenues above time-series forecasts. Furthermore, analysts almost always underestimate the revenues of internet firms. Historical revenue growth has incremental predictive power over analysts' forecasts for portal and content/community firms, but not for our e-tailer sample. Moreover, the stocks of the portal and content/community firms with high historical revenue growth earn higher abnormal returns during our sample period than do those with low historical growth. Estimates of web usage growth generally do not have incremental value over analysts' forecasts for predicting the revenues of either set of firms. However, perfect foreknowledge of actual web usage growth would provide incremental predictive power. Collectively, our findings point to the potential value for forecasting purposes of both improving upon the web usage estimates and obtaining more timely reports of actual web traffic.     

Contingent valuation of ill health caused by pollution: testing for context and ordering effects

Contingent valuation is being increasingly used to value episodes of ill health caused by environmental pollution. In contrast to studies that have used contingent valuation to value other types of non-market goods, health episode valuation studies have tended to 1) value several ill health episodes or symptoms in the same survey, and 2) be vague in the survey instrument about the cause of the ill health, how it would be avoided or how the improvement would be paid for. The resulting values are then combined with exposure-response functions to generate economic estimates of health damages from pollution. This study tests whether episode valuation responses are sensitive to two of these design features. In a five-country study using split sample treatments, neither episode ordering nor mention of the cause of the ill health influenced stated willingness to pay to avoid specific ill health episodes.JEL Classification: C42, I12, Q51 Correspondence to: Richard ReadyThis research was supported by the European Unions Environment and Climate Research Programme: Theme 4 - Human Dimensions of Environmental Change (contract no. ENV4-CT96-0234). Any views expressed in the paper are not necessarily the views of any of the authors employers.     

Can Openness Help Make a Miracle?

Several empirical studies indicate that there is a positive relationship between openness to international trade and growth. Lucas (1988) argues that this relationship poses a paradox for neo-classical theory because trade liberalisation produces only limited level effects, not long-run growth effects, in neo-classical growth models. This paper attempts to resolve Lucas paradox by adding production sectors to the basic one-sector Solow model. This paper demonstrates that these multi-sector models are consistent with the empirical links between openness and growth. These models also blur the traditional distinctions between exogenous and endogenous growth theory. As a result, they substantially complicate the task of discriminating between exogenous and endogenous growth episodes in empirical data.     

Framing and situational ethics

Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) suggests a number of subjective biases to which human judgment is prone (such as the framing effect). Economic consequences of such biases have received ample attention; however, potentially important ethical implications have been neglected. We conducted an experiment in which 81 M.B.A. students were asked to choose between two courses of action, one less ethical than the alternative. Printed scenarios varied the framing of the choice problems. Findings suggest that the propensity to choose a less ethical course of action over a more ethical alternative can be influenced by how a decision problem is described or framed.     

Pricing participating policies under the Meixner process and stochastic volatility

We propose a model for the valuation of participating life insurance products under the Meixner process, which belongs to the family of semi-heavy tailed processes. This particular model assumption is extremely desirable as it captures the stylised features of the return distribution, with existing moment generating functions. The highlight of the paper is the analytical solution derived for minimising the relative entropy between the historical and risk-neutral measures, when driving a pricing kernel. Further, we capture the stochastic volatility effect using an accurate polynomial approximation technique. Finally, to highlight the practical applications, we conduct a simulation experiment.     

Benefit Transfer in Europe: How Reliable Are Transfers between Countries?

The benefits for specific health impacts related to air and water quality were measured in simultaneous contingent valuation surveys conducted in five different European countries. Consistent inter-country differences in willingness to pay to avoid ill health episodes could not be explained by measurable differences in individual characteristics. International transfer of unit values resulted in an average transfer error of 38%. Accounting for measurable differences among countries in health status, income and other demographic measures, either through ad hoc adjustments to the transferred values or through value function transfer, did not improve transfer performance.     

Multisource feedback: Lessons learned and implications for practice

Organizations around the world are using multisource, or 360‐degree, feed‐back. Although many HR practitioners embrace it as an important mecha‐nism for leadership development, organizations must attend to and address several issues in order to maximize the utility of multisource feedback (MSF). We discuss current research findings and highlight issues for managers to consider both before starting a multisource feedback process and after the feedback is given, plus we review potential outcomes of the process. We also describe lessons learned from an intensive three‐year investigation of an MSF implementation in two organizations. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.