UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item ESSAYS ON PHARMACEUTICAL ADVERTISING(2015) DAI, WEJIA (DAISY); JIN, GINGER Z; SWEETING, ANDREW; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation focuses on two distinctive issues in pharmaceutical advertising. One on the matching choices between advertisers and advertising agencies, and the other on the effect of paid-link advertising on consumer search for online pharmacies. The goal of this dissertation is to empirically uncover the underlying economic mechanisms. Moreover, the analysis of matching problem provides new insights on the formation of vertical relationships between clients and professional service agencies and has implications for professional service market consolidations. And the examination of consumer searches for pharmaceuticals online sheds lights on consumers' concerns over quality and affordability of prescription drugs and draws attention on advertising regulation. In the first two chapters, I focus on two essential features of the market for professional services. One is the necessary mutual agreement in forming relationships, and the other is that a client perceives conflict when hiring the same service agency as his product market competitor. To incorporate these two features, I construct and estimate a two-sided matching model and allow agents' choices to depend on conflict. The results show that conflict does indeed reduce match surplus, and the reduction is greater for a pair of agents who have matched with each other in the previous period. Also, preserving previously formed matches yields much higher surplus than forming new matches. Based on these estimates, I conduct a counterfactual exercise to illustrate the effect of conflict on allocation of matches and another counterfactual exercise to illustrate the effect of a merger between advertising agencies on market equilibrium. In the third chapter, coauthored with Matthew Chesnes and Ginger Jin, we examine how government's sudden ban of foreign online pharmacies from paid search on Google and other search engines changes consumer searches for the banned websites. Using click-through data from comScore, we find that non-NABP-certified pharmacies receive fewer clicks after the ban, and this effect is heterogenous. In particular, pharmacies not certified by the NABP but certified by other sources, referred to as tier-B sites, experience a reduction in total clicks, and some of their lost paid clicks are replaced by organic clicks. These results have implications for the change in consumer search cost and health concern.Item More Than Luck: Lucky Strike Advertising During the George Washington Hill Years: 1926-1946(2015) Stump, Tyler S.; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the time George Hill assumed the presidency of the American Tobacco Company in 1926 until his death in 1946, the company spent more money advertising Lucky Strikes than had ever before been spent on a single product. During Hill's tenure, Americans bought more than 100 billion Lucky Strikes annually. Hill's carefully engineered and innovative advertising campaigns integrated print, radio, public relations, and other forms of advertising to great success in the 1920s and 1930s as the company sought out a mass audience. By World War II, however, the company changed strategies as it increasingly diversified its advertisements to reflect new conceptions of audience segmentation. This abandonment of a "great mass audience" approach paralleled changes in other cultural industries in this period, demonstrating the significance of advertising as part of the mid-century cultural landscape and emphasizing the genius of the ATC's marketing.Item Retailing Religion: Business Promotionalism in American Christian Churches in the Twentieth Century(2011) Hardin, John Curran; Sicilia, David B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Evangelist Billy Graham once remarked, "We are selling the greatest product on earth - belief in God - why shouldn't we promote it as effectively as we promote a bar of soap?" His comparison is misleading in its simplicity, since it strikes at the heart of the complex relationship between religion and the modern American marketplace. Retailing Religion examines how American Christian churches in the twentieth century promoted their institutions and messages by adopting modern public relations, advertising, personal sales, and marketing techniques from the secular business community. Retailing Religion develops four principal themes. First, Christian churches in the twentieth century followed the promotional trends of corporate firms with only a slight lag time. Second, this borrowing nurtured the growth of rationalism and individualism in American Christianity, which contributed significantly to the religion's modernization. This transformation was especially pronounced in churches' growing dependence on rational methods and numerical metrics, and in their transition from a producer orientation to a consumer orientation. Third, church promotional efforts increased not the secularization but the pluralization of American Christianity by erecting a platform for cooperation among churches, denominations, and religions. Fourth, church promotionalism fostered an ongoing tension between their sacred mission and their secular methods. Wrestling with this tension, both advocates and critics of church promotion labored throughout the century to develop historical, theological, and pragmatic arguments to defend or denounce the practices. The tension was so complex and often contradictory that some of the strongest advocates for religious retailing were also its biggest critics. The key historical actors in this study are the leading pioneers and practitioners of church promotion: organizations such as the Religious Public Relations Council; experts such as Gaines Dobbins, Philip Kotler, Peter Drucker, and George Barna; pastors such as Robert Schuller, Bill Hybels, and Rick Warren; and critics such as David Wells and Os Guinness. In tracing their adoption, development, implementation, and dissemination of the latest business promotional methods, Retailing Religion provides a broad portrait of American religion's struggle to remain both faithful to the divine and relevant to the world.Item How Cadillac Became Cadillac(2010) Benson, Edwin John Mortimer; Sicilia, David B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the process by which General Motors' Cadillac brand of automobiles came to dominate the U.S. luxury car market between 1927 and 1960. In 1927, Cadillac was only one among a crowded field of U.S. and European automobiles priced above $3000, the threshold of the luxury car market at the time. Through a skillful process of marketing, the corporate strength of General Motors, and the mistakes and ill-fortune of its competitors; Cadillac came to hold at least 50% of the U.S. luxury car market throughout the 1950s, and in some years accounted for nearly 70% of that market. It also briefly examines the reasons for Cadillac's decline in the market during the years since 1960.Item ESSAYS IN EMPIRICAL INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION(2009) Chesnes, Matthew William; Rust, John; Jin, Ginger; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chapter 1: Capacity and Utilization Choice in the US Oil Refining Industry This paper presents a new dynamic model of the operating and investment decisions of US oil refiners. The model enables me to predict how shocks to crude oil prices and refinery shutdowns (e.g., in response to hurricanes) affect the price of gasoline, refinery profits, and overall welfare. There have been no new refineries built in the last 32 years, and although existing refineries have expanded their capacity by almost 13% since 1995, the demand for refinery products has grown even faster. As a result, capacity utilization rates are now near their maximum sustainable levels, and when combined with record high crude oil prices, this creates a volatile environment for energy markets. Shocks to the price of crude oil and even minor disruptions to refining capacity can have a large effect on the downstream prices of refined products. Due to the extraordinary dependence by other industries on petroleum products, this can have a large effect on the US economy as a whole. I use the generalized method of moments to estimate a dynamic model of capacity and utilization choice by oil refiners. Plants make short-run utilization rate choices to maximize their expected discounted profits and may make costly long-term investments in capacity to meet the growing demand and reduce the potential for breaking down. I show that the model fits the data well, in both in-sample and out-of-sample predictive tests, and I use the model to conduct a number of counterfactual experiments. My model predicts that a 20% increase in the price of crude oil is only partially passed on to consumers, resulting in higher gasoline prices, lower profits for the refinery, and a 45% decrease in total welfare. A disruption to refining capacity, such as the one caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, raises gasoline prices by almost 16% and has a small negative effect on overall welfare: the higher profits of refineries partially offsets the large reduction in consumer surplus. As the theory predicts, these shocks have a smaller effect on downstream prices when consumer demand is more elastic, resulting in a larger share of total welfare going to the consumer. Chapter 2: Consumer Search for Online Drug Information Consumers are increasingly turning to the internet and using search engines to find information on medicinal drugs. Between 2001 and 2007, the number of adults using the internet as an alternative source of health information doubled. At the same time, online and offline advertising spending by drug companies is growing rapidly. I seek to understand how consumers use search engines to find drug information and how this activity is influenced by direct to consumer advertising. I utilize a database of user click-through data from America Online to analyze the search behavior of consumers seeking drug information online. Compared with other searches, users submitting drug-related queries are more likely to click on more than one result in a search session, and when they do, they click more rapidly through the results and tend to migrate away from dot-com sites and toward those ending in dot-org and dot-net. Offline advertising on a drug serves to increase the frequency and intensity of these searches. Chapter 3: Drug Information via Online Search Engines This paper utilizes a database of organic and sponsored search results from four large search engines to analyze the supply of drug-related information available on the internet. I show that the information varies significantly across search engines, domain extensions, and between organic and sponsored results. Regression results reveal that websites with relatively more promotional content are pushed down in the search results while informational sites (including those ending in dot-gov and dot-org) are more likely to appear on page one of the results.Item Race and Mass Consumption in Consumer Culture: National Trademark Advertising Campaigns in the United States and Germany, 1890-1930(2008-02-25) Cserno, Isabell; Thornton Dill, Bonnie; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how and why visual imagery in selected advertising material in the United States and Germany between 1890 and 1930 influenced the materialization of mass consumption as an important part of national culture. What emerges out of this study is a comparison of two different national environments that despite cultural differences relied on discourses on racialized identities to attract consumers and sell brand name products. This dissertation proposes that in both countries, trade card series in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century helped establish visual elements as important communicators to mass consumers, especially by drawing on easily recognizable motifs of patriotic and racialized mythologization. By the turn of the nineteenth century, as newspaper and magazine advertising continued to grow, the visual compositions of advertisements continued to become more sophisticated in both narrative as well as stylistic composition. This work relies equally on scholarship from the traditional disciplines of history and art history, as well as from the growing interdisciplinary work produced in American Studies, especially its subdivision of visual and material culture. The multidisciplinary methods of African American Studies and other related fields such as Black Diaspora Studies have shaped this dissertation's theoretical foundation of the complex processes of racialization. This dissertation examines three brand name products that started using black trade characters as their trademarks: Aunt Jemima pancakes and Cream of Wheat in the United States, and Sarotti Chocolate in Germany. All three product campaigns emerge at a time of complex social and economic changes as both Germany and the United States evolved as powerful nation-states with colonial and imperialist politics.Item Three Essays on Vertical Product Differentiation: Exclusivity, Non-exclusivity and Advertising(2004-11-12) Costantino, Cesar; Betancourt, Roger R; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since Hotelling's (1929) seminal work, economists have tried to understand how product differentiation affects price competition. I study the product location decisions, on a vertical characteristic space, of two sets of horizontal competitors when the inputs supplied by the "upstream" set (the manufacturers) and the input supplied by the "downstream" set (the retailers) are combined one-to-one to form a final good under the assumption that each manufacturer sells through one retailer exclusively. I find that the final product provided by each manufacturer-retailer pair shows maximum differentiation along one dimension and minimum differentiation along the other (MaxMin equilibrium). I conduct the same analysis under the assumption that each manufacturer sells to any retailer and each retailer buys from any manufacturer. I find a Nash Equilibrium in which each firm differentiates its product completely from its horizontal competitor. Finally, I estimate the effect of advertising on consumer brand choice and search behavior. Under imperfect information, advertising can affect consumer behavior by providing economically relevant information in a convenient way. I find that advertising has an increasing effect on consumers' search effort and on the probability of purchase associated with the featured brand.