Why marketing should quit giving subliminal advertising the benefit of the doubt

The popular belief in subliminal advertising has remained robust in spite of the fact that advertising professionals almost universally discount it as a practical technique. The current psychological theories of Silverman [Silverman, L. H. (1976). Psychoanalytic theory: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. American Psychologist, 31 (Sept.), 621–637] and his colleagues provide a conceptual basis for how changes in behavior might result from subliminal stimulation. However, the theory specifies stimulus conditions which make it highly unlikely that successful use of subliminal messages could be achieved in a promotional context. In light of Silverman's theories, even two recent demonstrations of subliminal effects in the advertising literature fail to enhance the credibility of subliminal advertising as a professional tool.     

Beer consumption and Third World nutrition

The consumption of alcoholic beverages, particularly commercially made beer, is rising rapidly in Third World countries. Yet very little is known about how this affects the nutritional status of those whose intake has increased (adult males) and that of their family members. The situation would appear to contain the potential for severe inequalities in the distribution of resources between those who hold the purse strings and those who do not. For this reason, the increase in sales of alcoholic beverages should be considered worthy of the attention of nutritionists and planners.     

Network Intermediaries in International Trade

Motivated by evidence on the importance of incomplete information and networks in international trade, we investigate the supply of network intermediation. We build a general-equilibrium model in which agents with networks of foreign contacts either can use their networks themselves in support of production or can make their networks available for others to use and thereby can become network intermediaries. We use this model for comparative statics and welfare analysis. One welfare conclusion is that intermediaries may have inadequate incentives to maintain or to expand their networks, suggesting a rationale for the policies followed by some countries to encourage large-scale trading companies.     

The compliance cost of taxing foreign-source income: Its magnitude,determinants, and policy implications

This paper uses survey evidence to estimate the compliance cost of the U.S. system of taxing foreign-source income. The evidence suggests that this cost is about 40 percent of the total tax-compliance cost of large U.S. corporations, which is disproportionately higher than the aggregate share of assets, sales, and employment that is abroad. It is also very high compared to the revenue raised by the United States from taxing foreign-source income, although this comparison must be qualified because arguably a principal purpose of this system is to protect U.S. revenues collected on domestic-source income. The disproportionate compliance cost of foreign-source income is not apparent in a survey of European-based multinational corporations.     

ASYMPTOTIC NORMALITY OF A NONPARAMETRIC INSTRUMENTAL VARIABLES ESTIMATOR*

This article gives conditions under which the nonparametric instrumental variables estimator of Hall and Horowitz (Annals of Statistics 33 (December 2005), 2904–2929) is asymptotically normally distributed. With sufficiently large samples, the asymptotic normality result can be used to form confidence intervals for the unknown function that is estimated by the Hall–Horowitz procedure. The article reports the results of a Monte Carlo investigation of the finite‐sample coverage probabilities of the confidence intervals.     

Hotel performance and knowledge sources in Spanish tourism districts

The present paper brings together two of the research lines which have proved most relevant in the field of strategic management during the last few years: the importance of knowledge as a source of competitive advantage; and the ease of access to that resource within clusters and/or industrial districts. More specifically, our work focuses on the tourism sector, analysing the extent to which the profitability of Spanish vacation hotels located along the Mediterranean coastline depends on internal and external knowledge, that is, on the knowledge resources generated at each destination. A multiple linear regression is designed for the empirical analysis. The evidence supports the hypothesis that the external knowledge generated at each destination is statistically significant, even though internal knowledge turns out to be more relevant in terms of hotel profitability.