A Theoretical Analysis of the Pricing and Advertising Strategies with Lévy-Walking Consumers

The pervasive adoption of mobile devices and proximity technologies enables firms to trace consumers’ trajectories and locations. This connects firms’ marketing and operations strategies more tightly with consumer mobility. In this paper, we propose a novel analytical model to examine the economic effects of consumer mobility on pricing and advertising strategies by incorporating consumers’ Lévy-walking behavior into advertising economics models. We ascertain the convergent effect of consumer mobility, i.e., consumers’ convergence to a firm leads to higher product price and advertising level. Meanwhile, it improves social welfare by increasing firm profit and consumer surplus. More interestingly, we find that consumers’ average movement distance (AMD) has opposing influences in pricing and advertising strategies. Specifically, longer AMD strengthens the convergent effect on advertising strategy but weakens that on pricing strategy. Finally, we also conduct a numerical analysis to uncover the impacts of the presence of proximity technologies on advertising outcomes. The results of this paper provide advisable guidance to firms on how to craft and adjust pricing and advertising strategies in accordance to consumer mobility. Moreover, the results present insights on welfare implications of informative advertising from the perspective of consumer mobility.

A Note on the Existence of the Competitive Equilibrium in Grossman and Shapiro (1984)

In their seminal paper, Grossman, G. M., and C. Shapiro. 1984. “Informative Advertising with Differentiated Products.” The Review of Economic Studies 51: 63–81 assume that it is not profitable for a firm to deviate to the supercompetitive price of Salop, S. C. 1979. “Monopolistic Competition with outside Goods.” The Bell Journal of Economics 10: 141–56. In this note, it is shown that this assumption is violated if, roughly, each firm reaches less than half of all consumers unless it is a duopoly. This implies that most of the simulations in Grossman, G. M., and C. Shapiro. 1984. “Informative Advertising with Differentiated Products.” The Review of Economic Studies 51: 63–81 are not actually equilibria. More importantly, this implies that for their equilibrium to exist nearly all consumers must receive at least one ad. For example, with just four firms in the market, at least 96% of the consumers must receive at least one ad, and this percentage increases with the number of firms in the market.

Communicative and linguistic trends in Elon Musk’s personal branding (based on Twitter publications in 2020)

This research is dedicated to the study of the main communicative trends and linguistic specificities of Elon Musk’s personal branding. The paper analyses over 500 Tweets posted by Elon Musk in his personal Twitter account throughout 2020 and classifies them into 7 categories according to their communicative aim with regard to brand-building. According to the results of the analysis, informative, advertising, self-promotion, provocative, entertaining, bonding and saving face Tweets were singled out. We examined each group separately, tracing their influence on building, maintaining or boosting Elon Musk’s personal brand, as well as on countering threats to its status. The study analyses the most representative examples of each group and explains their role in Elon Musk’s personal branding. As part of the present research, we studied linguistic devices employed by Elon Musk within the brand-building effort and concluded that irony, codeswitching, quoting, play on words, slogans, slang abbreviations / netspeak and extralinguistic signs are the main linguistic trends of his personal branding. The research proves that Elon Musk’s personal brand is consistent, competitive and shows high resistance to the attacks of adversaries on its status and to various challenges that could undermine its authority. The paper traces how Elon Musk uses his Twitter account to present himself as a visionary for space colonization and robotization, a member of geek and meme communities, to reinforce his image of bold, charismatic and influential businessman, who appreciates real talent and does not distance himself from common people and popular culture. The study reveals Twitter to be a powerful branding source, as it has wide outreach, real-world repercussions and global significance.

Prepurchase Information Acquisition and Credible Advertising

Consumers can decide whether to acquire more information about their valuations prior to purchase. In this paper, we examine pricing and advertising strategies when consumers can engage in prepurchase information acquisition. We show that consumer information acquisition can increase valuation heterogeneity and undermine a firm’s ability to extract consumer surplus. As a result, interestingly, a higher product quality can exert a nonmonotonic impact on equilibrium information acquisition, hurt firm profitability, and lead to lower consumer surplus. We also demonstrate that prepurchase information acquisition can be an endogenous mechanism to enable credible advertising in a cheap-talk setting. We show that quality claims in advertisements can be informative even when the firm can freely misrepresent its advertising message. Informative advertising can arise because a higher perceived quality can not only increase consumers’ expected value, but it also induces more information acquisition and thus hurts the firm’s ability to extract consumer surplus. This novel explanation for the credibility of cheap-talk advertising is distinguished from those identified in the literature (e.g., matching between firm types and heterogenous consumers, restrictive communication on multidimensional attributes). Moreover, we show that a higher quality can soften competition by inducing more information acquisition, thus benefiting the rival firm’s profitability. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.

The system of professional skills in the structure of readiness of future specialists in the social sphere for sustainable development of social groups

In accordance with the purpose, the article describes the essence of readiness of future specialists in the social sphere for the sustainable development of social groups as well as substantiates the place of the system of professional skills in its structure. In the course of the scientific research the following methods were used: analysis, synthesis, systematization and generalization. As a result future social teachers’ and workers’ readiness for sustainable development of social groups is defined in the study as a stable integrative personal and professional ability, based on the acquired motivational, theoretical and practical values, significant personal and professional qualities and manifested in the active creative social and pedagogical activity aimed at sustainable development of social groups, considering the specific characteristics of different of them. The components (motivational-axiological, competence-creative, personality-reflexive) of the future social specialists’ readiness for sustainable development of social groups are determined. The system of professional skills of future specialist, which ensure the success of professional activity for sustainable development of social groups, is substantiated. The specified system is represented by: general pedagogical skills (intellectual-research, constructive-prognostic, information-cognitive, educational-methodological, reflexive-corrective), general skills of a social worker’s professional activity (to implement a social-educational, informative, advertising, preventive, correctional and rehabilitation work in the context of sustainable development) and specific skills (communicative-stimulating and organizational-managerial). The study shows that communicative and stimulating skills are necessary for realizing convincing influence on the motives, values, beliefs of representatives of different social groups in order to promote their sustainable development. Organizational and managerial skills provide the ability to coordinate the activities of different social actors to create spiritually full stimulating and creative environment in society in order to move the representatives of various social groups up to the level of self-organization and self-management. In conclusion the article describes the ways of formation of the future specialists’ identified skills in different types of activity during studying at a university.

PATRONAGE OF ISLAMIC AND CONVENTIONAL BANKS: THE CASE OF SYRIA

The aim of this study is to understand perception of conventional banks’ customers towards Islamic banking by examining their level of awareness about Islamic banking. The qualitative approach was used in the form of semi-structured interviews under the phenomenological approach in Damascus city. The main findings of this research are customers lack awareness of Islamic banking operations. Furthermore, Islamic banks’ stuff play a crucial rule to enhance awareness and willingness towards their services. This study revealed that an informative advertising campaign is highly recommended to raise the awareness level among Syrians towards Islamic banking. Moreover, Islamic banks should be more selective especially when they recruit customer service operation staff. This research is a pioneering attempt towards Islamic banking issues in the case of Syria from a customer perspective. It contributes to the Syrian perceptions towards Islamic banking literature.