Critical social marketing – The impact of alcohol marketing on youth drinking: Qualitative findings

• This paper presents findings from exploratory qualitative research as part of a critical social marketing study examining the impact of alcohol marketing communications on youth drinking. The findings from stakeholder interviews (regulators and marketers) suggest that some alcohol marketing might target young people, and that marketers are cognisant of growing concern at alcohol issues, including control of alcohol marketing. Focus groups with young people (aged 13–15 years) revealed a sophisticated level of awareness of, and involvement in, alcohol marketing across several channels. It was found that some marketing activities featured content that could appeal to young people and appeared to influence their, well‐developed, brand attitudes. The research demonstrates the utility of taking a critical social marketing approach when examining the impact of alcohol marketing. The implications of these findings for research, regulation and policy around alcohol marketing are also examined. The contribution that studies such as this make to the debate around marketing principles and practice, and to social marketing, is also discussed.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The visible hand: finger ratio (2D:4D) and competitive bidding

In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values and 400 subjects, we scan also the right hand of each subject. We study how the ratio of the length of the index and ring fingers (2D:4D) of the right hand, a measure of prenatal hormone exposure, is correlated with bidding behavior and total profits. 2D:4D has been reported to predict competitiveness in sports competition (Manning and Taylor in Evol. Hum. Behav. 22:61–69, 2001, and H?nekopp et al. in Horm. Behav. 49:545–549, 2006), risk aversion in lottery tasks (Dreber and Hoffman in Portfolio selection in utero. Stockholm School of Economics, 2007; Garbarino et al. in J. Risk Uncertain. 42:1–26, 2011), and the average profitability of high-frequency traders in financial markets (Coates et al. in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106:623–628, 2009). We do not find any significant correlation between 2D:4D on either bidding or profits. However, there might be racial differences in the correlation between 2D:4D and bidding and profits.     

Stock return reversal and continuance anomaly: new evidence from Hong Kong

Using weekly data, this article conducts a comprehensive analysis and presents new empirical evidences on the short-term stock return reversal and continuance anomaly in the Hong Kong stock market. We confirm that winner stocks behave differently from loser stocks in that the return reversal phenomenon is pervasive within past winner stocks only while past loser stocks tend to show weak return continuance. The arbitrage strategy can earn significantly positive contrarian profits, especially for small firms and illiquid stocks. The anomaly varies across different industries and is also sensitive to the market movement. Despite the existence of the anomaly, our results still in general suggest that the Hong Kong stock market is weak-form efficient because arbitrage trading costs would largely overwhelm the available profits in most cases.     

Future S&T management policy issues—2025 global scenarios

This article presents four scenarios depicting science and technology (S&T) management dilemmas of the next two decades. The scenarios concern the balance between risk and promise, between the need to steer the directions of S&T, to minimize risk, and the need to maintain a free and unconstrained S&T agenda. These scenarios were constructed in the third year of the Millennium Project's study of this topic. The scenarios were formed in an interactive process with the project's international participants. The key policies that were found to be useful in all of the scenarios include (1) when considering the possibility of the misuse of weapons of mass destruction by terrorists, include the possibility of misuse by a single individual, acting alone; (2) establish mechanisms and techniques for making possible the explicit unintended consequences of scientific research and technology, including malicious uses; (3) for desirable technologies, where it may not be possible to avoid significant risks, develop mitigation strategies in parallel; (4) teach science ethics.