Investigates empirically the importance of buyer characteristics as well as product and service classifications on the informational content of advertising supply by sellers utilizing Yellow Pages advertisements from six US cities. The analysis and tests extend the categories used in previous tests by including so‐called “credence goods” by analysing the impact of alternative buyer characteristics as proxies for time and information costs. The intra‐city and, to a lesser extent, inter‐city comparisons lend support to the contemporary theory of advertising as information.

This study analyzes differential appointments by gender to the rank of named professorship based on a sample of 511 management professors. This sample represents approximately 90% of our original survey sample of faculty at Tier 1 American research universities, with 10 or more years of experience since receiving their PhD, and whose contact information we could obtain online. Contrary to the tenets of the meritocratic evaluation model, we find that, after controlling for research performance and other factors, women are less likely to be awarded named professorships, particularly when the endowed chair is awarded to an internal candidate. Furthermore, we find that women derive lower returns from their scholarly achievements when it comes to appointments to endowed chairs. Our study suggests that a masculine-gendered environment dominates management departments, leading to shifting standards when it comes to the highest senior appointments in academe.

The present paper provides statistical evidence of the positive role played by athletics within the mission of higher education. With data provided by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the present study employs a superior measure of athletic success as advertising to that of previous studies, and provides evidence that basketball success at colleges and universities in the US aids these institutions in attracting quality students—who themselves are seeking the institution offering an optimal bundle of consumption and investment benefits with regard to human capital attainment. The evidence presented here supports previous studies which point out that athletics may indeed enhance the mission of a university