The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a Nine-Year Experiment

Large-scale management experiments in the moist maritime forests of the Pacific Northwest

BackgroundPrevious studies suggest the usefulness of CDT in distinguishing between neurodegenerative diseases. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in CDT performance in individuals with AD and PD compared to normal controls.MethodsTotal of 194 participants. Four groups included in analysis: patients that met diagnostic criteria for late MCI/mild AD, moderate AD, PD with no cognitive impairment, and normal controls. All participants completed MMSE and CDT. MMSE score ≤ 23 considered moderate AD, MMSE score >24 considered mixed late MCI/mild AD, all PD patients had MMSE score >24.ResultsAn ANOVA was used to examine group differences in CDT and MMSE scores. There was a significant main effect of group for both CDT and MMSE scores (p < 0.001). Moderate AD group had significantly lower MMSE scores compared to other groups (average MMSE score of 19.4 for moderate AD compared to 26.6 for mild AD, 26.9 for Parkinson’s, and 28.2 for controls). Post‐hoc t‐tests (Bonferroni corrected for multiple comparisons) showed moderate AD group had significantly higher error scores on CDT compared to controls (p<0.001). Moderate AD group also had significantly higher error score compared to both MCI/mild AD and PD patient groups (p<0.001). No statistical significance existed in error scores between MCI/mild AD group compared to controls (p = 0.134) or to Parkinson’s disease (p = 1.000). No statistical significance in CDT error scores between the Parkinson’s group compared to controls (p = 0.904). Findings suggest executive functioning may only begin to significantly decline in advanced stages of AD.ConclusionOur findings suggest that deficits in executive functions measured by CDT is impaired in moderate AD but relatively preserved in MCI/mild AD and PD with no cognitive impairment, which is consistent with previous studies. One limitation of the study is that we did not include a copy trial for the CDT, which may support that our findings are due to executive dysfunction rather than visuospatial deficits. Future directions include increasing sample sizes, including individuals with PD with cognitive impairment, and using novel digital versions of the CDT to different variables of the CDT such as time to start and complete, visuospatial coordination, and graphic size.

Controversy has surrounded the welfare effects of advertising, mainly Concerning consumer welfare effects. Unfortunately, the measures of consumer Welfare effects in most studies have been ad hoc and incorrect. The consumer Welfare consequences of advertising can be measured consistently and accurately When consumer demand equations are derived from an expenditure function. This ls illustrated using the Almost Ideal Demand System, which is popular in econometric estimation of food demand systems. An empirical application uses data on Australian meat consumption to evaluate generic advertising of meats. The results from using a theoretically correct money-metric measure of consumer Welfare effects, taking account of cross-cotnmodity effects of advertising and price Changes, are compared with ad hoc approaches previous studies have proposed. In addition, the consumer welfare measures are combined with measures of Producer benefits in order to compute private and social returns.

The HLA-A2 allele has recently been considered as a risk factor in AD by advancing the age at onset of the disease, especially in subjects who were homozygous for the apoE epsilon4 allele. We examined the distribution of apoE genotypes and A2 allele as a function of age at onset in 109 patients with sporadic and familial AD. In the early onset (< or =60 years) and late onset (>75 years) AD groups, there was, respectively, a 2.2 year and a 2.7 year earlier onset in the A2 positive cases. Age effect was not apparent in the middle onset (61-75 years) AD group. The effect of A2 allele on the age at onset was not different between familial and sporadic AD cases. The presence or absence of the A2 allele did not modify mean age at onset in the groups homozygous and heterozygous for epsilon4, and in cases with no epsilon4 alleles. Though the sample size was small, there is a trend in favor of an A2 effect on age at onset. Additionally, there is no evidence of interaction between A2 and apoE epsilon4 alleles on age at onset of AD.

Background and Objectives:Physical activity and sleep are potential modifiable risk factors for the development of Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders (ADRD), but few studies have objectively measured both domains in participants across the cognitive continuum.Research Design and Methods:Standard clinical assessment, accelerometry, and at-home EEG sleep data were obtained from older controls (n=9) and adults who met consensus diagnostic criteria for mild cognitive impairment (MCI; n=7), Alzheimer’s disease (AD; n=10), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB; n=11). Given these sample sizes, descriptive statistics are presented rather than formal statistical testing.Results:The MCI group had the most surprising findings—although they were cognitively similar to the control group, they were less physically active than the AD group and had the worst sleep efficiency. The DLB group had the most severe motor and neuropsychiatric symptoms, were the least physically active, spent the least amount of time in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and spent the highest amount of time in non-REM sleep with hypotonia (NRH). The AD group had physical activity counts that fell between the DLB and control groups; REM sleep and NRH levels that were similar to the control and MCI groups; and autonomic activation index (AAI) and sleep spindle durations that were higher than the MCI and DLB groups.Discussion and Implications:These findings highlight interesting physical activity and sleep patterns between groups, but larger samples are needed to investigate how objectively measured physical activity and sleep might serve as disease-specific digital biomarkers of neurodegenerative disorders.

As the Web2.0 Internet has become more popular, online word-of-mouth is the process by which consumers disseminate their views about marketplace goods and services. Online word-of-mouth is quite common for consumers online to gather information through the Internet before deciding on buying a product online or in a brick and mortar store. In recent years, the numbers of people using social networking sites has increased dramatically. There are now more than half a billion registered users of the well-known global social networking site, Facebook. It is the important social networking sites in the world and Taiwan. . The site affords a convenient means of establishing social capital by finding and connecting with friends through the friend finder feature. People can easily interact with friends through online word-of-mouth exchanges in Facebook. Thus, people can establish their friends networked of social capital with friends in Facebook. Facebook is a key platform on which people love to share online word-of-mouth. As a result, Facebook serves as the main platform in this study. This study applied and revised the research of Chu’s dissertation framework. Chu suggests that the effects of online word-of-mouth information sharing and delivery behavior depend on five factors: social capital, tie strength, homogeneity, trust and interpersonal influence. This study determines the effects of these five factors on online word-of-mouth information sharing and delivery behavior in Facebook. In addition, this study through the Google Analytics program embedded in the test page for click rates and the way of field experiment method to explore the effects of different levels social capital among users’ on online word-of-mouth effect. This study also surveys the five factors for their effects of online word-of-mouth. The results of this study demonstrate that：social capital, tie strength, homogeneity, trust and interpersonal influence effect online word-of-mouth information sharing and delivery behavior in Facebook. It is worth noting that, when the sender has more the characteristics endowed with less social capital friends, strong tie, lower homogeneity, higher trust and higher interperpersonal influence, the more willing they will be to delivery online word-of-mouth. On the other hands, the online word-of-mouth effects demonstrate that：when the sender has more social capital friends in Facebook, the effects of their online word-of-mouth will be better. The results also found, the best effects of online word-of-mouth were characterized with high social capital friends, weak tie strength, the lower homogeneity, while, the factors of trust and the lower interpersonal influence are less affect online word-of -mouth effect. In addition, the life cycle for the effects of online word-of-mouth is very brief over in 1-3 days, and may decline with time. Finally, the results of this study can inform enterprises and prospective advertisers through establishing benchmark indexes of online word-of-mouth. Accordingly, we could conclude that enterprise can make good use of numerous functions in Facebook; it can effectively establish consumer brand impressions and help maintain favorable online word-of- mouth.

Peer-to-peer information sharing has fundamentally changed customer behavior. More importantly, recent developments in information technologies have enabled digital sharing platforms to influence various granular aspects of this information sharing process. Despite the growing importance of digital information sharing, little research has examined the optimal design choices for a platform seeking to maximize returns from information sharing. My dissertation seeks to fill this gap. Specifically, I study novel interventions that can be implemented by the platform at different stages of the information sharing process. In collaboration with a leading for-profit platform and a non-profit platform, I conduct three large-scale randomized field experiments to causally identify the impact of these interventions on customers’ sharing behaviors as well as the sharing outcomes. The first essay examines whether and how a firm can enhance social contagion by simply varying the message shared by customers with their friends. Using a large randomized field experiment involving more than 20,000 senders and 50,000 recipients, I find that small variations in message content can have a significant impact on both recipient’s purchase and referral behaviors. Specifically, I find that i) adding only information about the sender’s purchase status increases the likelihood of recipients’ purchase, but has no impact on follow-up referrals; ii) adding only information about referral reward increases recipients’ follow-up referrals, but has no impact on purchase likelihood; and iii) adding information about both the sender’s purchase as well as information about the referral rewards increases neither the likelihood of purchase or follow-up referrals. I then discuss the underlying mechanisms that drive these outcomes. The second essay studies whether and how a firm can uncover the (self-, other-, or group-regarding) motives underlying an individual’s share and design customized incentive accordingly. I conduct a large field experiment to examine the impact of incentive design on sender’s purchase as well as further referral behaviors. I randomly assign more than 20,000 promotional emails to the sender who shared but did not purchase. I find evidence that incentive structure has a significant, but interestingly opposing, impact on both outcomes. The empirical results also provide valuable insights on senders’ motives in sharing. The third essay examines whether and how a non-profit platform can design conditional group incentives to motivate donors to donate as a group. In collaboration with a blood bank in China, I combine a large field experiment involving 80,000 donors with a structural model to identify the effect of different interventions on donor’s self-donation and group donation decision. I find nonprofits can stimulate group effects and increase donations, but only with appropriate incentives. In summary, the findings from the three large-scale randomized field experiments offer valuable insights for firms on how to engineer digital platforms to create social contagion. The rich data from experiment also allow me to test the underlying mechanisms at work. In this way, the proposal will also contribute to our theoretical understanding of peer-to-peer information sharing.

This paper tries to show how the major features of the behavior of advertising can be explained by advertising's information function. For search qualities advertising provides direct information about the characteristics of a brand. For experience qualities the most important information conveyed by advertising is simply that the brand advertises. This contrast in advertising by these qualities leads to significant differences in its behavior. How does advertising provide information to the consumer? The producer in his advertising is not interested directly in providing information for consumers. He is interested in selling more of his product. Subject to a few constraints, the advertising message says anything the seller of a brand wishes. A mechanism is required to make the selling job of advertising generate information to the consumer. [Авторский текст]

Competition and Entry in Small Airline Markets

Consumers oftentimes have to queue up to obtain a service and suffer disutility in waiting. Since waiting is not desirable, they often avoid long queues and choose to retry the service later. There is paucity of research on decision-making in queues on how consumers may postpone their visits and retry later. We study an observable queue in which consumers make rational join, balk and (costly) retrial decisions upon arrival. Retrial attempts could be costly due to factors including but not limited to disutility of the service delay, transportation costs, fixed costs and visit fees. We characterize the consumer equilibrium under such retrial behavior, and study its welfare effects in both low-traffic and overloaded systems. We show that with an additional option to retry, consumer welfare could worsen compared to the welfare in a system without retrials. Surprisingly, self-interested consumers retry too little (in equilibrium compared to the socially optimal thresholds) when the retrial cost is low, and retry too much when the retrial cost is high. We also find retrials can generate positive externalities by smoothing consumer arrivals into a service system. We extend our findings on consumer equilibrium and welfare to populations with heterogeneous retrial costs.

In this article, we introduce and showcase how social media can be used to implement experiments in public administration research. To do so, we pre-registered a placebo-controlled field experiment and implemented it on the social media platform Facebook. The purpose of the experiment was to examine whether government funding to nonprofit organizations has an effect on charitable donations. Theories on the interaction between government funding and charitable donations stipulate that government funding of nonprofit organizations either decreases (crowding-out), or increases (crowding-in) private donations. To test these competing theoretical predictions, we used Facebook’s advertisement facilities and implemented an online field experiment among 296,121 Facebook users nested in 600 clusters. Through the process of cluster-randomization, groups of Facebook users were randomly assigned to different nonprofit donation solicitation ads, experimentally manipulating information cues of nonprofit funding. Contrary to theoretical predictions, we find that government funding does not seem to matter; providing information about government support to nonprofit organizations neither increases nor decreases people’s propensity to donate. We discuss the implications of our empirical application, as well as the merits of using social media to conduct experiments in public administration more generally. Finally, we outline a research agenda of how social media can be used to implement public administration experiments.

Increasing parental intervention in order to diminish the detrimental effects of social media sites

This study was conducted to examine youths’ online political participation in Ethiopia with a focus on students’ Facebook usage in six randomly selected universities. The research specifically aimed to study the extent of participation, the main online political activities, and factors that determine such involvements. For this purpose, the research utilized a quantitative method with survey design. The sample size was 400 and the samples were selected by using the simple random method. Descriptive statistics were used for analysis. Accordingly, the research found limited youth’s involvement in those activities that require more commitments and efforts while they found to be active in activities that require low efforts and commitments. Low political efficacy and fear of political measures were found to be the main factors that force youths to have limited involvement in activities that require more efforts and commitments.

The DUring Nearshore Event EXperiment (DUNEX) was a series of large-scale nearshore coastal field experiments focused on during-storm, nearshore coastal processes. The experiments were conducted on the North Carolina coast by a multidisciplinary group of over 30 research scientists from 2019 to 2021. The overarching goal of DUNEX was to collaboratively gather information to improve understanding of the interactions of coastal water levels, waves, and flows, beach and dune evolution, soil behavior, vegetation, and groundwater during major coastal storms that affect infrastructure, habitats, and communities. In the short term, these high-quality field measurements will lead to better understanding of during-storm processes, impacts and post-storm recovery and will enhance US academic coastal research programs. Longer-term, DUNEX data and outcomes will improve understanding and prediction of extreme event physical processes and impacts, validate coastal processes numerical models, and improve coastal resilience strategies and communication methods for coastal communities impacted by storms. This report focuses on the planning and preparation required to conduct a large-scale field experiment, the collaboration amongst researchers, and lessons learned. The value of a large-scale experiment focused on storm processes and impacts begins with the scientific gains from the data collected, which will be available and used for decades to come.

Large-scale interdisciplinary experiments inform current and future forestry management options in the U.S. Pacific Northwest