An exploration of rule configuration effects on the ethical decision processes of advertising professionals

This study explores the ethical perceptions of advertising professionals regarding two child-oriented television advertising issues: deceptive messages and host selling. Differences in ethical evaluative and decision processes are investigated for both issues, using two evaluative rules. The results indicate that variations in advertisers’ ethical judgments and ethical intentions are affected by the type of rule(s) used during the evaluative process, and by the degree to which the rules are embraced. The article concludes with recommendations for advertising management and implications for future research. She graduated with honors in 1989 from Mississippi State University with a D.B.A. in marketing. She has practical experience in marketing research and her research interests are ethics and social responsibility, and professional services marketing. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Michigan State University in 1980. He is the coauthor of two books on business ethics and has contributed numerous articles on ethics to various academic and applied business journals. He received his D.B.A. in marketing from Louisiana State University in 1969. He has coauthored two books on business ethics and has published articles on ethics in marketing journals. He is a frequent lecturer on business ethics. She graduated in 1990 from Mississippi State University with a D.B.A. in management. Her research interests are business ethics and student ethics, and corporate social responsibility.     

PIMS and BCG: New horizons or false dawn?

Strategic market opportunities arise either because a firm is exceptionally well placed competitively or because it recognizes the opportunity, on the basis of private information, before others. Strategic market analysis must reflect these two possible routes to attractive opportunities. Both the approaches developed by the Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) through its Profit Impact of Market Strategy (PIMS) and the Boston Consulting Group's (BCG) growth/share matrix fail to reflect the full impact of competitive expectations and risk. Analysis of PIMS data should be directed more towards generalities of limited direct economic significance whereas the BCG approach should be used mostly in the context of experience curve effects. Neither approach should dominate a full analysis of the specific nature and critical ambiguities in any strategic option.     

The Convergence of Mirroring and Empathy: Communications Training in Business-to-Business Personal Selling Persuasion Efforts

Purpose: This study assessed the value of training in mirroring combined with training in empathy in a personal-selling setting when these two supplement training in more conventional areas. To a large extent, this investigation is exploratory. Previous attempts to probe into this topic do not appear in the literature.

Methodology: Students in personal-selling classes acted as sales representatives in an attempt to sell a service (attendance at a seminar) to small retailers. One group was trained in mirroring and another in empathy. Yet another received instruction in both mirroring and empathy. Finally, control-group members received neither mirroring nor empathy training. Chi-square tests, t tests, Tukey k tests, and an analysis of variance were used. The hypotheses were that mirroring and empathy training, and especially mirroring combined with empathy, would perform better than no training in these areas.

Findings: The analysis revealed that those who were trained in mirroring were more successful in obtaining intent to purchase than were control-group members. Likewise, trainees in empathy were more successful than those without training. Both of these experimental groups performed at levels that did not diverge significantly. Members of the group with instruction in both mirroring and empathy contributed more effectively than any other group.

Originality, Value, and Contribution: This is the first published study that systematically examined the effectiveness of both mirroring and empathy training in a personal-selling setting. Previous writings have presented research relating to nonselling functions. Others have discussed the value of mirroring and empathy in narrative that was not supported by data. The findings of this study suggest that both of these topics of coverage have merit when acting as a supplement to more conventional training content. They reveal that sales managers may be more successful in training members of the sales force if mirroring and empathy training is employed. The investigation supplies support for the proposition that this form of instruction can be useful in both academic and practical applications.     

Competition and market power in physician private practices

This article presents a theoretical and empirical model to examine competition in physician private practices implementing a conjectural variation framework. Our study uses the 1998 American Medical Association Physician Socioeconomic Monitoring Survey and tests for collusion and market power in physician private practices. The year 1998 is of particular interest due to charges filed in Federal court by The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) against a number of large physician practices, ruling that physicians could no longer engage in joint negotiations. The indictments by the DOJ were based on anecdotal economic and legal observations rather than the result of empirical evidence from accepted econometric modeling. Our model indicates that the behavior of physicians in medical subspecialties and surgical subspecialties is consistent with a non-cooperative Nash equilibrium.     

Homogeneity and heterogeneity in information technology private standard settings – the institutional account

The IT (information technology) standardisation landscape is characterised by the increasing importance of private standard setting consortia, a greater convergence between the structural features of formal and private standard organisations, and greater diversity in standard organisations. Institutional theory has been applied to explain the convergence of standard setting bodies. This paper applies institutional theory to four studies of standards organisations, showing that there are indeed homogenising mimetic, coercive and normative forces in standard setting that lead to the convergence of emergent organisations with the institutional features, but that there are also forces promoting heterogeneity, in particular the multiplicity of institutional fields within which standards consortia operate, leading to a complex, and often conflicting, matrix of institutional norms to be accommodated.     

An Algorithm for Allocating Sponsored Recommendations and Content: Unifying Programmatic Advertising and Recommender Systems

Retailing and media platforms recommend two types of items to their users: sponsored items that generate ad revenue and nonsponsored ones that do not. The platform selects sponsored items to maximize ad revenue, often through programmatic auctions, and nonsponsored items to maximize user utility with a recommender system (RS). We develop a binary integer programming model to allocate sponsored recommendations considering dual objectives of maximizing ad revenue and user utility. We propose an algorithm to solve it in a computationally efficient way. Our method is a form of postfiltering to a traditional RS, making it widely applicable in two-sided markets. We apply the algorithm to data from an online grocery retailer and show that user utility for the recommended items can be improved while reducing ad revenue by a small amount. This multiobjective approach unifies programmatic advertising and RS and opens a new frontier for advertising and RS research. We provide an extended discussion of future research topics.