Advertising is a company’s major form of communication with the market; it is a component of the IMC system, having a special impact on the addressee, and is a form of persuasive communication affecting consumer behaviour. Advertising may reflect information asymmetry between an advertiser and recipients. This book presents an assessment of the forms and range of consumer behaviour manipulation through information asymmetry in online advertising and explores the possible causes, forms, and effects. The work offers a new approach to the role of advertising in the digital world, especially its forms and impact strategies. The theoretical framework presented is based on issues related to online advertising, information asymmetry, and social manipulation. The book describes the ways in which these areas can be explored, and it presents the results of empirical studies. Empirical research allows for identifying companies’ moral hazard strategies and their consequences – e-consumers’ adverse selection. The research provides an empirical answer to the question: to what extent is advertising a transparent form of communication, and to what extent does it represent the world of manipulation? Based on an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, empirical studies conducted by the authors, and theoretical and managerial implication, the book encourages its readers to find their own answers. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this work, it will be of interest to scholars and researchers within the fields of marketing, media and communication, economics, psychology, sociology, and ethics.

Pay-for-performance (P4P) pricing schemes such as pay-per-click and pay-per-action have grown in popularity in Internet advertising. Meanwhile, the traditional pay-per-impression (PPI) scheme persists, and several advertising publishers have started to offer a hybrid mix of PPI and P4P schemes. Given the proliferation of pricing scheme choices, our study examines the optimal choices for advertising publishers. We highlight two-sided information asymmetries in online advertising markets and the consequent tradeoffs faced by a high-quality publisher using P4P schemes. When there exists information asymmetry, P4P pricing schemes enable a high-quality publisher to reveal her superior quality; on the other hand, they may incur allocative inefficiencies stemming from inaccurate estimates of advertiser qualities. Our study identifies conditions under which a publisher may opt for a PPI, P4P, or a hybrid scheme and in doing so provides a theoretical explanation for the observed variations in the pricing schemes across publishers. Using a new “uncompromised” equilibrium refinement, we also demonstrate that the hybrid scheme can emerge as an equilibrium choice in a wide range of conditions. In addition to explaining the co-existence of multiple pricing schemes and the growing popularity of hybrid pricing schemes, our study also provide prescriptive guidelines for firms making choices among different pricing schemes.

Advertising on e-commerce marketplaces, wherein sponsored product listings are interleaved with organic product listings, is a large and growing phenomenon. In this paper, we both theoretically and empirically study whether including sponsored listings improves or hurts the overall quality and relevance of the set of products displayed to consumers. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the relevance of the ads to the consumers' search queries depends on the level of information asymmetry between the marketplace owner and the sellers who sell products with different degrees of relevance. Specifically, when information asymmetry is low (high), i.e., the platform can (cannot) easily distinguish between high- and low-relevance sellers, then low-relevance (high-relevance) sellers have a greater incentive to advertise. However, even when low-relevance products are displayed as ads, consumers end up finding well-matching products as long as search and evaluation costs are reasonable; therefore, the overall impact on sales is relatively small while the marketplace benefits from the additional revenue from selling ads. We obtain data from a large-scale field experiment run at Flipkart, a leading online marketplace in India, and find that various empirical patterns implied by our theoretical results hold in the data. Our study provides several practical implications for managers of online marketplaces.

This open access Pivot demonstrates how a variety of technologies act as innovation catalysts within the banking and financial services sector. Traditional banks and financial services are under increasing competition from global IT companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon and PayPal whilst facing pressure from investors to reduce costs, increase agility and improve customer retention. Technologies such as blockchain, cloud computing, mobile technologies, big data analytics and social media therefore have perhaps more potential in this industry and area of business than any other. This book defines a fintech ecosystem for the 21st century, providing a state-of-the art review of current literature, suggesting avenues for new research and offering perspectives from business, technology and industry.

This book is the first to present a review and synthesis of the research in knowledge management and strategy management. The readings in this book will help readers get an understanding of the best methods to create and apply knowledge in order to sustain superior organizational performance.

Digital Advertising offers a detailed and current overview of the field that draws on current research and practice by introducing key concepts, models, theories, evaluation practices, conflicts, and issues. With a balance of theory and practice, this book helps provide the tools to evaluate and understand the effects of digital advertising and promotions campaigns. New to this edition is discussion of big data analysis, privacy issues, and social media, as well as thought pieces by leading industry practitioners. This book is ideal for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students, as well as academics and practitioners.

The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication Proceedings and post-proceedings of referred international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.