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A critical problem, continually faced by managers in developing "effective" resource allocation plans, is that only limited partial information is available about the system under consideration on which to base these plans. This is particularly true in planning involving the limited information typically available on the relevant behavior and characteristics of large human populations. This paper develops the insight that partial information--which at first scrutiny appears to contain only severely limited information about the system--in many important cases actually contains (or stores) a great deal of the relevant total system information needed for planning (or control). This insight leads to powerful methods for retrieving the needed information about the behavior and characteristics of the total system from the information contained in the partial information data. In the present paper, we illustrate these information retrieval methods by developing and applying them to partially specified media audience exposure systems to retrieve certain critical total system information needed for media planning. More specifically, partial information on the audience of a combination of advertising media vehicles consisting of only two information quantities--the sum of the individual audiences, and the sum of the audiences of all pairs of media vehicles in the combination--is shown, in fact, to contain a significant amount of the information about the audience exposure pattern of the combination that is needed for media planning evaluation. Theory and methods are developed which retrieve, from these two quantities, operationally useful information on the unduplicated audience, the average exposure frequency, and the frequency distribution of audience exposure of the combination. The retrieval methods developed in this paper have been successfully applied to evaluating and developing "effective" media selection programs. These retrieval methods... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are advertising appropriations, as related to share of national income, at an all-time high? Most advertising men say "yes" without hesitation. But this is not true, as a distinguished business historian demonstrates in this article. Actually advertising's current share of national income is lower than in any decade from the 1890's through the 1930's. The author points out that this phenomenon is related to the fact that advertising expenditures in constant dollars go farther than thirty years ago. In fact, they result in 2½ times greater per capita exposure to advertising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The allocation of advertising expenditures by area and by media is a problem faced by most marketing organizations The problem with certain assumptions can be treated with some of the techniques of game theory In this paper several mathematical models will be described along with their solutions The models are theoretical and are based on various assumptions about the effect of advertising on sales The validity of these assumptions as well as the possible application of these models is discussed [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-standing but much abused distinction between "informative" and other types of advertising is discussed in the paper. This difference is revealed in a differential effect on economic performance. There is considerable ambivalence in the literature on the efficiency aspects of advertising. While advertising is conceded to be a source of information - a sine qua non for smoothly functioning markets - it has been argued that certain types of advertising are anti-competitive in their effect. It has proved difficult for economists to drop the distinction and hence resulted in one of the researches. After a brief literature survey, section II develops a theoretical distinction between informative and goodwill advertising. Section III outlines a test of the hypothesis that the different kinds of advertising will have opposite effects on market performance. Section IV presents the results of this test. Section V summarizes and relates the results to other recent work on the economics of advertising.

In a recent article Peter Doyle's [8] survey of the literature concerning the economic effects of advertising suggests that the failure of standard economic logic in this controversial area is due partly to the lack of a time dimension in the analysis and partly to the treatment of price and advertising solely as substitute methods of expanding sales. As a consequence, and central to the advertising controversy, considerable disagreement exists concerning the effect of advertising on the prices of monopolistic firms. This paper proposes an alternative approach to the analysis of advertising which demonstrates that, when time lags are explicitly introduced into demand functions, advertising can be an effective complement to a price decrease, thereby producing a lower optimum price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic effects of advertising have been a much studied and hotly debated topic for a number of years. By now, there is fairly general agreement that, inter alia, advertising is important as a barrier-to-entry, and that advertising does succeed in shifting demand for individual products, but there is little agreement as to the effect of advertising on aggregate consumption. There has been no effort made to examine by econometric methods the proposition that advertising has an impact on the aggregate consumption function. To undertake this is the purpose of this paper. Based on an analysis of advertising expenditures in the aggregate, the results suggest that advertising does in fact tend to increase consumption at the expense of saving. But as to what the causal mechanism underlying this is, can not be said. It may be that advertising actually succeeds in altering tastes, but then again it may be that advertising is simply serving to bring new goods and services to the attention of consumers.

The purpose of this article is to examine some of the literature in Economics that concerns itself with the economics of advertising and to present some of the public policy implications of the results of these studies. It is found that it is unlikely that advertising expenditures are subject to increasing returns to scale, thus probably do not lead to an increased concentration of industry for this reason. A study is presented that deals with competition by advertising expenditures and product differentiation in the U.S. cigarette industry. It is found that advertising expenditures, during the 1956-68 period, were not effective in obtaining sales from competitors, although they may have had the affect of inducing new customers to buy the product. The effect of anti-smoking commercials is examined, and it is found that, although they may have had some effect on cigarette smoking, it is doubtful that they provide the impetus for the decreases in advertising expenditures in this particular industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several marketing abstracts relative to advertising and promotion. They include "Survey Finds Cooled Economy has Little Effect on Sales Promotion," "Measuring the Impact of Real Estate Advertising," by Richard Hansen and Richard Scott, and "Studying the Advertising Media," from the July, 1970 issue of the journal "Supermarketing."