Opportunity Knocks: An Economic Analysis of Television Advertisements

Certain aspects of advertising–especially on television–are not easily explained with conventional economic models. In particular, much of the imagery and repetitive thematic content seen in advertisements suggests it is "psychological" in nature, as opposed to "informative". To understand the economic rationale for incorporating such material, we develop a theory of preferences in which information about threshold payoffs induces sudden shifts in demand. These threshold payoffs are best understood in the context of human evolutionary history. Furthermore, the presence of threshold payoffs in consumer preferences gives firms incentive for providing threshold-type information. To examine the use of threshold-related content in television advertisements, we look for this con- tent in a sample of 370 television advertisements. We find considerable evidence that advertisers make strategic use of threshold-type content in television advertisements. Specifically, threshold-related content occurred in 83% of food and beverage advertisements for children and in 71% of advertisements for general audiences. Furthermore, the threshold-related content in children’s food and beverage advertisements occurred with statistically greater frequency than factual content, which isn’t true for food and beverage advertisements for general audiences.

Incomplete pairwise comparison matrices and weighting methods

A special class of preferences, given by a directed acyclic graph, is considered. They are represented by incomplete pairwise comparison matrices as only partial information is available: for some pairs no comparison is given in the graph. A weighting method satisfies the property linear order preservation if it always results in a ranking such that an alternative directly preferred to another does not have a lower rank. We study whether two procedures, the Eigenvector Method and the Logarithmic Least Squares Method meet this axiom. Both weighting methods break linear order preservation, moreover, the ranking according to the Eigenvector Method depends on the incomplete pairwise comparison representation chosen.

Preferences of Hungarian consumers for quality, access and price attributes of health care services — result of a discrete choice experiment

In 2010, a household survey was carried out in Hungary among 1037 respondents to study consumer preferences and willingness to pay for health care services. In this paper, we use the data from the discrete choice experiments included in the survey, to elicit the preferences of health care consumers about the choice of health care providers. Regression analysis is used to estimate the effect of the improvement of service attributes (quality, access, and price) on patients’ choice, as well as the differences among the socio-demographic groups. We also estimate the marginal willingness to pay for the improvement in attribute levels by calculating marginal rates of substitution. The results show that respondents from a village or the capital, with low education and bad health status are more driven by the changes in the price attribute when choosing between health care providers. Respondents value the good skills and reputation of the physician and the attitude of the personnel most, followed by modern equipment and maintenance of the office/hospital. Access attributes (travelling and waiting time) are less important. The method of discrete choice experiment is useful to reveal patients’ preferences, and might support the development of an evidence-based and sustainable health policy on patient payments.

Az IKT-eszközökkel kapcsolatos preferenciák és használatuk előrejelzése (Preferences and usage forecast of ICT tools)

A szerzők ebben a tanulmányukban az információs és kommunikációs technológiai (továbbiakban IKT) eszközök közül az asztali számítógépekkel (desktopok), laptopokkal (notebookok és netbookok), táblagépekkel és okostelefonokkal foglalkoznak. Az IKT-eszközök elterjedtségének vizsgálatánál meghatározó szerepet játszik a technológia jelenléte mellett a társadalom befogadóképessége. A technológia és társadalom kapcsolatát különböző módszerekkel és modellekkel mutatják be, melyek indokolják ezen eszközök növekvő használatának szükségességét. Ebben a tanulmányban a modellekből és a felmérésekből összeállított tényezők beépítésével és az általuk feldolgozott kérdőívek elemzése által kirajzolódnak minták és olyan összefüggések, amelyek magyarázatot adhatnak a különböző eszközhasználat okainak megértésére. _____ In their study the authors deal with the desktop computers (Desktop), laptops (notebooks and netbooks), smartphones and tablet machines among of information and communication technology (hereinafter referred to as ICT) tools. The capacity of society is one of the key elements in the examination of spread of ICT. The relationship between technology and society is presented with different methods and models that are justified by the need for increasing the use of these devices. In this paper such samples and correlations are emerged of the models and surveys, which may explain the reasons for understanding of the different tool use.