The Corporate Side of the Blogosphere: Examining the Variations of Design and Engagement Among Fortune 500 Blogs

Using design and communication principles, this study uses a content analysis design to evaluate all active blogs from the 2011 Fortune 500 list (n = 125). The results indicate that corporate America has only modestly incorporated the dialogic principles into their blogs. Current corporate blogs are well-designed as far as making them searchable and easy to navigate; however, the blogs are mostly being used to provide information in a one-way manner rather than creating an open dialogue with consumers. While blogging can enhance relationships with stakeholders, corporate communicators must strive to develop legitimate conversations with their blog readers.     

Media Catching: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Strategic Mediatization in Public Relations?

A form of strategic mediatization, media catching is the reversal of the traditional public relations process of pitching story ideas to journalists using press releases, feature pitch letters, and other techniques. In media catching, journalists working on specific stories reach out to large numbers of public relations practitioners using a variety of technologically aided services with queries for specific information. Using quantitative and qualitative content analyses, this study examines journalist queries submitted through a media request service, Pressfeed.ru, to understand the dynamics of the media-catching trend in Russia. Findings show a substantial gap between reporters’ expectations and public relations professionals’ goals and abilities, and a fragmentation of media outlets’ practices. The findings also revealed similarities in the growth and usage patterns of the Russian service to the first American media-catching service, Help-a-Reporter-Out. An empirical investigation is warranted to test an emergent model of the mutual influences of reporters, public relations specialists, internal (organizational values) and external (societal culture, political climate) factors during the process of media catching across different cultures and countries.     

Determinants of initial technology adoption and intensification: evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean

In this paper, we examine determinants of initial adoption and subsequent intensification of commercial use of the internet. In contrast to previous examinations that have looked at initial adoption and intensification in the highest income countries, we study companies in Latin America and the Caribbean and so contribute to empirical understanding of the two types of adoption. Many variables such as company size and industry intensification previously identified as influential in high-income regions continue to be important determinants. Novel determinants are also found, including informal sector competition and regional influence. There are sharp differences in determinants between the two adoption types.     

Dangers of commitment under rational expectations

Within a New Keynesian framework, interest rate rules that respond to public expectations lead to determinate and expectationally stable solutions for any level of commitment, as shown by Waters (Macroecon Dyn 13(4):421–449, 2009). That paper also demonstrates gains to commitment, under least square learning, though over-commitment can lead to some very poor outcomes for some parameter values. This paper shows an identical outcome under rational expectations. The optimal level of commitment is unchanged if there are observation errors in the policymaker’s knowledge of public expectations, which is not the case under learning. However, if there is sufficient policymaker uncertainty about the parameter values, partial commitment is best.     

Contributing Factors to the Spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases

A bstract .   Economists have long studied the determinants and effects of income transfers. This article examines an indirect effect of welfare payments on participating individuals: an increase in the incidence of sexually transmitted disease ( STD ) rates.
Several studies have found a significant and positive link between the size of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock fertility rates. Higher welfare payments reduce the cost of bearing and raising a child, and thus reduce the full cost of engaging in unprotected sex. An unintended consequence of unprotected sex is exposure to contagious diseases. This implies that states with higher welfare payments per child will experience higher rates of STDs.
We test this hypothesis using statewide data on the incidence of three types of bacterial STDs, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, for the years 1994 through 1998. The empirical specification is based on the standard microeconomic model of utility-maximizing behavior. The included explanatory variables are demographic proxies reflecting differences in state population characteristics. These characteristics capture unobservable or intrinsically unmeasureable differences in the perceived costs and benefits of engaging in unprotected sex.
The explanatory variable of primary interest is the size of the real welfare payment per recipient. Our empirical results indicate that states with higher real welfare payments are associated with greater rates of STDs.