This paper mainly deals with a special but highly-developing industry in China, net game industry. Due to the significant construction and improvement have been happening at China since 30 years ago, and the influence of traditional culture, population boom or demographic dividend and the invasion of western technologies and cultures, net game industry, which has been only existing for less than 15 years at China, has become one of most profitable industries and changed the living of millions of people. The goal of this essay is to explore the economic performance of networks during last dozen years in China and find the drivers and reasons. By picking up the data between 2001 and 2013, sufficient data and researches will be provided for the study for the network games in China.

Digitization has been pervasively reshaping the landscape of home-based telecommunication industries. The massive disruptive challenges call for telecom companies to react with efficient strategic managerial policies. Meanwhile, how consumer decision makings and welfare are impacted by such policies often remains complicated and non-transparent to policy makers. My thesis aims at leveraging large-scale empirical data to investigate the impacts of several prevalent firm initiated strategies on both sides of the market, i.e. consumers and firms. The thesis is comprised of three studies focusing on consumer switch, search and purchase behaviors. The first study, centering at consumer switching behaviors, investigates the impact of lock in shortening policies on both firm profits and consumer welfare in home-based telecommunication service market. Using household level data from a large telecommunications service provider, we show that a market level policy that shortens the lock-in period from the status quo can decrease the profits on the firms side more than it increases consumer surplus. This is majorly caused by the substantial acquisition costs associated with user switching and service initiation. As a result if regulators shorten lock-in periods but then firms respond by collaboratively increasing prices to recover their rate of return, the consumers, as the analyses indicate, may be worse off compared to the world in which lock-in periods do not change. Therefore lock-in reduction policy need to be paired with a policy precluding operators from increasing prices too much. The later two studies jointly examine consumer’s search and purchase behaviors in social environment. With a wide scope of services, telecommunication service providers can often leverage their knowledge on consumer’s social environment to reshape consumer choices. We aim to understand how consumers combine different sources of social information, one from friends versus one from the crowd, as a function of how close they are to the point of conversion. We developed a dynamic structural econometric model that jointly describes consumer information search and product purchase while taking into account sequential arrival of information and non-negligible search costs. The model is then instantiated on two connected yet distinct empirical contexts, where consumers shop for movies to watch on home screens. The first empirical context (discussed in the second study in this thesis) lies in an observational setting, where we studied individual level clickstream and transactional data from a Video-on- Demand service platform operated by a large telecommunication service provider. Later in the third study, we created an artificial movie market and leveraged a randomized web experiment to further study the research questions with more solid identification support. We find that, in both contexts, consumers seem to start by browsing products they heard about from friends. The popularity signals become more relevant when consumers getting closer to the point of purchase. The results have important managerial implications to online vendors by suggesting a reasonable strategy of providing the most valuable social information at the right time to enhance consumer shopping experiences.

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This dissertation focuses generally on consumer behavior, and particularly on consumer attitudes toward products of foreign origin for the purpose of developing a theory that will assist in explaining and predicting this phenomenon. Existing research in the area of country of origin effects upon consumer attitudes toward foreign-made products demonstrates significant methodological limitations such as single cue approaches., The major objective of this dissertation is to contribute to the development of a theory based upon the expectancy-value attitude concept to better explain and predict consumer attitudes toward products of foreign origin. To achieve this objective, the research attempts to overcome the limitations identified in attitude research and specific methodological deficiencies in research focusing on attitudes toward products of foreign origin by: 1. utilizing the expectancy-value approach; 2. basing operationalization of the attitude concepts on Likert-like scales and subjective conditional probabilities; 3. measuring the operationalized attitudes both directly and indirectly via beliefs and evaluations; 4. simultaneously including multiple extrinsic cues; 5. including pictorial cues in the questionnaire; and 6. performing and reporting validity and reliability tests. The general model developed in this research, representing the theory of attitudes toward products of foreign origin is the Foreign Product Attitude Model (FPAM). This dissertation will concentrate on an extracted part of the total model, namely the relationships between the informational stimuli cues and the attitudinal response. The informational extrinsic informational cues include the country of origin, the brand name, the store image and an involvement covariate. By concentrating on the above relationships it is hoped that this study will contribute to a better understanding of the direct effects of the informational stimuli upon the attitude toward a product of foreign origin. The country of origin effect and the other extrinsic cues (brand name and store image) were found to have significant effects on consumer attitudes toward products, explaining almost 20 percent of the total variance.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the differentials and commonalties in the consumer behavior and attitudes of the working woman as opposed to the non-working woman. The findings of the research are analyzed to determine their impact on the performance of marketing institutions and functions. The major hypothesis tested in this research is: Working women comprise a distinct market segment, which differs in kind from the non-working woman. Both primary and secondary data are used for this study. The principal sources of secondary data are the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Government Census Tracts of the Census of Population. The primary data was obtained from a questionnaire, sent to 1,093 women residing in specific Census Tracts within the Dallas, Texas Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. The Tracts were selected by geographical dispersion and statistically tolerable limits for female labor force participation and median family income. This criteria insured the inclusion of women for whom the value of work was either high or low. The analysis of the data revealed that working women may be segmented into a distinct consumer market. Demographic characteristics related to consumer behavior were found to be (in order of importance) Age, Income, Education, Age of Children at Home, and Marital Status. The working woman is more likely to be younger, unmarried, have fewer, if any, children at home, and have a family income of less than $10,000 dollars, than her nonworking counterpart. Major differentials, related to work status were found in the areas of Food Shopping, Personal Clothing Shopping, Use of Leisure Time, Newspaper Readership and Television Viewing, Frequency of Eating Out, Use of Vending Machines, Use of Mail Order Catalogs, Attitude Toward and Use of Discount Houses, Opinion and Use of Advertising and Its Portrayal of Women, and Use and Knowledge of Credit. The use of services was more related to income than to work status.

This thesis is designed to explore consumer attitudes and behaviors toward corporations that engage in socially responsible practices. The goal of this project was to determine if there was a relationship between a company’s perceived reputation for social responsibility and attitudes and behaviors that would favorably impact the company. Specifically, the project uses a case study of UPS and its support of Zoo Atlanta to further test these relationships in a true-to-life scenario. The findings reveal implications for corporate communication efforts in two ways: first, by serving as a framework to evaluate future corporate giving programs and to better understand company reputation; and second, by understanding the importance of strategically positioning one’s company as a good corporate citizen.

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