An exhibition about advertising and identity.

Decision making is a central concept in the study of both politics and organizations. Although much research has examined how individuals make decisions, there has been substantially less work on the consequences of these decisions. My dissertation focuses on two groups of decision makers, candidates running for office and public managers, and the effect of their decisions on the electorate and organization, respectively. The dissertation explores the impact of candidates' decisions regarding their campaigns on the electorate by examining campaign advertising during the 2000 Presidential Election. I focus on two candidate decisions. The first is to focus on certain issues as a way to prime the public to see the candidate as having certain traits, namely empathy, morality, and leadership ability. The second is to show voters that the candidate is like them by activating (i.e. priming) feelings of social identity among women, African-Americans, and Latinos. Using campaign advertising data and public opinion data, I analyze the effect of campaign advertising on voters' evaluations of the candidates to determine the effectiveness of these strategies. Results find that an effective strategy was for the candidates to air ads describing themselves as having certain traits. Talking about issues does not have much of an effect on voters' candidate evaluations. Appeals to women were not effective. Appeals to African-Americans were only effective for the Democratic candidate, and appeals to Latinos were only successful for the Republican candidate. I examine the decisions of public managers by focusing on middle level bureaucrats and the consequences of their decisions on their agencies. The agencies are public schools in Texas and the middle managers are principals. From a dataset of over 1,000 Texas school districts, I create a measure of principal quality which I then use to explore the impact of middle management on multiple school performance measures and to compare the influence of principals and superintendents on performance. I also examine the effect of principals within in the organization, namely how principals affect the turnover of the workers under them. Results find that principals have a direct and beneficial influence on organizational performance measures such as standardized test scores, college readiness, and turnover. To summarize the results more generally, the dissertation finds that the decisions actors make within the political process matter in important and significant ways.

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Advertising has been one of marketing tools for companies for decades. The question of how advertising affects company¡¦s financial performance had also been answered by marketing literatures. But most of the literatures focus on advertising¡¦s direct effect. How the other factors influence advertising¡¦s effect had been researched rarely. The purpose of this article is to understand how the industry concentration influences the contribution of changes in advertising expenditures. The result shows: (1) the effect of advertising on net sales persist five years or more in manufacture, at the same time, six years or more in retail and service industries (2) in manufacture, the industry concentration has positive effect on the contribution of changes in advertising expenditures, the more industry concentration, the more contribution of changes in advertising expenditures.

As a media genre, advertising is viewed as a distorted mirror which reflects the complexity of culture, advertising therefore offers a unique opportunity to study the different context across cultures. This article generally looks at how advertising reflects culture by contrasting the expression of one core dimension of cultural values, individualism/collectivism, in print advertisements from two diverse societies: United States and Taiwan. This research analyzes the content of 591 American and Taiwanese print advertisements appearing from 2003 to 2004. Firstly, this article seeks to examine how Western advertising in Taiwan is. The results of this investigation reveal that 55.2 percent of the advertisements employed Western language (mainly English) and 45.5 percent of the advertisements utilized Caucasian models. With the appearance of English words and Western models in Taiwanese advertising, we might presume that Taiwanese commercial messages are indeed becoming more Western. However, I have no reason to believe that Taiwanese advertising is being wholly westernized, and therefore future researches are needed. Being traditionally classified as collective society, Taiwan has undergone tremendous transformation in terms of political/economical systems and the advertising industry through the process of industrialization and globalization. As to United States, it takes the leading role in the era of globalization and has imposed great impact on most parts of the world in economical or cultural way. Secondly, this research compares individualism/ collectivism appeared in this two different societies. According to the results, the use of single individuals is more pronounced in advertisements from Taiwan (73.1%), and less pronounced in United States (59.0%). This article also finds that advertisements from Taiwan as well as United States both reflect hybrid culture. For example, advertisements from the United States employed large proportion of appeals to self-improvement or self-realization while also contained the image of harmonious grouping. In contrast, advertisements from Taiwan embraced both Western and Eastern cultures, and therefore the content of Taiwanese advertising not only reflected the concerns about others, but contained a greater extent of focus on ambition. However, differences observed tend to be differences in degree, not in kind. In addition, this research also finds that ¡§product category¡¨ and ¡§product origin¡¨ would somehow influence the presentation of cultural values. Future intercultural research should take these two factors into consideration. In summary, this research found some similarities as well as differences between Taiwan and United States. The contents of advertisements reflect the hybridization of these two cultures and therefore illuminate the complicated and fluid essence of culture. The results imply that contemporary Taiwanese and American advertising is not only a ¡§distorted mirror¡¨ but a ¡§melting pot¡¨ of cultural values. There is no longer absolute and remote distance between East and West. Considered the macro structural power behind the advertising context, this research has admitted that the relationship among social context, cultural values and advertising should never be simple. The abundance and complexity of culture needs to be examined through different viewpoints instead of simply dichotomy or only one single research.

Abstract This article is about the false, misleading advertising and harmful behavior to goodwill in China. Generally speaking, advertisement is the best marketing way and an unique characteristic in the West¡]always mean capitalist society¡^. And advertising is related to the anti-trust law that combines the science of law and economy. After 1979 PRC¡¦s reform, economical power¡]or the market¡^is the greatest concern in their policy-making. In 1987, PRC issued the formal statute of advertising in place of the interim procedures¡]1982¡^. But the first anti-trust law in the world is Sherman Act¡]1890¡^of USA. According to Sherman Act and the rule of ¡§true in advertising¡¨, FTC Act¡]1914¡^stops the false and misleading advertising in USA, because those are unfair competitions. All capitalist countries want a fair and faultless market. After comparing the law against false advertising in USA and Taiwan with China, we will observe how to enforce the anti-trust law. After understanding the differences of those laws in three countries, we could find out whether those work or not. Through the enforcements in these countries, we realize that the capitalist power often affects lawmaking a lot. Therefore, the governments should not neglect demand of market, especially in an immature capitalist society.

This dissertation, in its most general context, is an investigation into the modeling of markets with imperfectly informed agents. In such markets, there will invariably be incentives for informed agents to take advantage of information asymmetries by disseminating the relevant information to uninformed agents. Similarly, there will be incentives for uniformed agents to reduce the adverse effects of information asymmetries by acquiring the relevant information. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the understanding of such markets can be greatly enhanced by explicit modeling both channels of information flow as omitting either channel could eliminate important interaction effects. The arguments in this dissertation are narrowly framed within a familiar differentiated market in which firms advertise and each consumer is imperfectly informed about which product is most suited to his taste. However, the conclusions drawn in the dissertation are applicable to more general economic systems in which it is costly for agents to acquire information relevant to the decision-making process. There is a long-standing debate in the literature about whether or not advertising is purely informative. Although there is extensive research on advertising models and consumer search models, little is known about differentiated markets in which firms advertise and consumers search. In modeling advertising and consumer search, this dissertation questions the relevance of two pieces of evidence that have been offered against the view that advertising is informative. In the first instance, I demonstrate that firms may use purely informative advertising and still maintain market power in the long-run in monopolistically competitive markets; this finding thus rejects the argument that firms rely on manipulating consumer preferences in order to maintain market power in these markets. In the second instance, I demonstrate that advertisements without any information about the product being advertised may still be informative to some consumers; this finding thus rejects the argument that the widespread use of uninformative television advertisements is inconsistent with the view that advertising is informative in nature. This dissertation shows that our understanding of the nature of advertising (information dissemination mechanism) is greatly enhanced by modeling consumer search (information acquisition mechanism).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-87). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-87). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.