Responsibilities of a Professional with Respect to the Law

Question: What are the obligations of an expert as for the law utilize the BCS code of training as a guide. What an expert ought to do, what mustnt they do how might they guarantee they act expertly in meeting their obligations regarding the law? Answer: Duties of an expert regarding the law Duty in straightforward words implies the undertaking or the activity which is to be appropriately finished or done by a specific. The other word which clarifies obligation is obligation. Calling of a people characterizes it proficient in its field.9 Parker, R. (2009). The expert. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons). To play out the job of that calling the aptitudes set, information characterizes it calling. Assume an individual is a specialist so its calling is designer and he/she is proficient in its field. (Demetriades, D. (2003). Data innovation. ) Oxford: Oxford University Press. As an I.T proficient the standards and guidelines characterized by the British Computer Society known as BCS must be followed. In correlation of general laws these laws are a greater amount of expert norms it is accepted by the specialists in the I.T field. Cooper, L. what's more, Felãšâ ¹dman, D. (2011). BCS. New Jersey: World Scientific. BCS has its own implicit rules which assists in setting the expert gauges, laws and rules. The BCS code clarifies the standards of practices according to the contemporary all-around request in I.T. The BCS set of accepted rules is utilized to portray the measures of training identified with I.T. The individual picking calling as ICT (Information Communication Technology) or IS (Information System) faculty needs to conveyance their obligations contemplating the code of practices of BCS. The BCS may set measures for the calling working in U.K just as for the expert working outside the nation. Bott, F. (2005). Proficient Issues in Information Technology. Swindon: British Informatics Society. Dos and Donts of the experts The expert is encouraged to follow all the regular practices however he/she may choose the practices applicable to the given aptitudes sets and streams. The code of good practice is planned as an electronic record which is accessible in a few configurations and the expert need to overcome it before beginning their work. The experts need to keep the gauges applicable to the companys business, innovation and advancement techniques. The norms must be utilized in the successful and smart way with the goal that the outcome accomplished is acceptable. The norms must be refreshed intermittently and the organization ought to inspire the representatives to embrace it. On the off chance that the expert is having any uncertainty about the laws and guideline, he/she ought to counsel to the specialists. For making the law refreshed different instruments and strategies must be used.(Rotunda, R. what's more, Dzienkowski, J. (2010). Proficient duty. [St. Paul, Minn.}: West, a Thomson Reuters business.) Affirmation that they are playing out their duties The specialists ought to consistently ensure that everybody is adhering to the laws and guideline under the BCS norms. The specialists ought to consistently look for the open door for expanding the attention to it in the organization (Rowland, D., Kohl, U. what's more, Charlesworth, A. (2012). Data innovation law. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.) Everyone ought to know about the laws and the measures pertinent to their activity. These aides in expanding the degree of best act of the person in the organization. To urge the calling to adjust the standard in their work life there ought to make mindful with the advantages of utilizing the principles. The specialists should ensure that the extension, timescales; duties are disclosed appropriately to the individual as it will help in choosing the standard identify with his work. The laws, guidelines are created taking in light of people in general, society, and workplace of the I.T experts. References Bott, F. (2005). Proficient Issues in Information Technology. Swindon: British Informatics Society. Cooper, L. what's more, Felãšâ ¹dman, D. (2011). BCS. New Jersey: World Scientific. Demetriades, D. (2003). Data innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, R. (2009). The expert. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Rotunda, R. what's more, Dzienkowski, J. (2010). Proficient duty. [St. Paul, Minn.}: West, a Thomson Reuters business. Rowland, D., Kohl, U. what's more, Charlesworth, A. (2012). Data innovation law. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

The Soliloquies Spoken By Hamlet Were Directed To The Audience, Rather

The speeches verbally expressed by Hamlet were coordinated to the crowd, as opposed to appearing discussions with himself. In the primary monologue, Hamlet discusses how disturbed at life he is and that if not for God's laws he would end it all. He isn't generally morning his dads demise in this monologue however more his disturb for his mom for damaging his uncle particularly a couple of months after his dad's passing. He at that point proceeds to clarify he should stay quiet. He is disclosing to the crowd that nothing can fix the circumstance to make it any better. Yet, that isn't adequate for Hamlet. Something must be finished. This talk starts an enthusiasm for the peruser and gives a brief look into Hamlet's musings while illuminating the crowd regarding the historical backdrop of his family's tribulations. In the second discourse Hamlet approaches the crowd, the diverted globe, to hear his promise to seek retribution on his uncle and to eradicate all from his psyche with the exception of that of what the apparition had educated him regarding. The phantom, Hamlet's dad, had disclosed to him that Claudius had executed him and his spirit couldn't rest until vengeance was brought onto his sibling. The crowd hears Hamlet's guarantee to make Claudius pay for his dangerous ways. As of now, the crowd is energized by hearing Hamlet's guarantee since it is giving them something to anticipate. In the third speech, Hamlet admits to the crowd he is a quitter; What an ass am I! He at that point proceeds to tell the crowd of his new plan to help draw reality out of Claudius. He accepts that the venue can make an individual encounter genuine feeling. He discovers this striking something anecdotal can make a reality. In any case, Hamlet concedes that he isn't sure if the phantom said to be his dad is truly who he says to be and not the making of Satan. Presently the crowd knows about Hamlet's interests and perhaps what has been keeping him away from making a move. Be that as it may, the ruler chooses to benefit from Claudius' soul by having the players reenact the homicide of his dad. At that point it is dependent upon Claudius' response to demonstrate to Hamlet that what the apparition talked about was in reality. Presently the crowd had considerably all the more a development of what is to come. The most popular monologue, the fourth, isn't as energetic yet increasingly curbed. With this discourse, Hamlet isn't simply looking at ending his own life however more the decision that is put before man between tolerating affront and torment from the world or retaliating at it. Hamlet offers the conversation starter Regarding life, is there any point to it. Hamlet appears to scan for an importance to life which is something every person in the crowd has mulled over before as well. Hamlet looks to discover an answer we as a whole have longed to know; is there post-existence and provided that this is true, is the existence he drives now any better? Should Hamlet right an inappropriate his uncle has made? That is the thing that he is asking himself. On the off chance that he does he will himself settle on an ethically crooked choice that would overload his own still, small voice. The crowd can relate with this; everybody has been confronted with an ethical difficulty more than once in their life. Subsequently soul makes quitters of every one of us. The crowd in hearing these words from Hamlet sees that Hamlet is unequipped for vengeance. The crowd is continually being remembered for Hamlet's thoroughly considering process the utilization of monologues. By including the crowd in the hero's contemplations it enables the genuine significance of the play to radiate through. The crowd is recounted past occasions without a portrayal that can once in a while detract from the play itself. The fundamental characters' musings are not generally evident to the crowd. By Shakespeare's works, the crowd is consistently mindful of Hamlet's present perspective.

Thomas v. Indiana Employment Security

Regardless of whether the State's forswearing of joblessness remuneration advantages to the candidate, who ended his activity since his strict convictions restricted him from taking part in the creation of combat hardware, established an infringement of his First Amendment option to free exercise of religion Facts: Petition Thomas was a Jehovah’s witness who worked at the Blaw-Knox Foundry and Machinery Co. He was at first recruited to work in the move foundry until he was moved to another division that manufactured turrets for military tanks.Since his primary capacity was identified with the creation of weapons he asked that he be moved to another office. Having discovered that the entirety of the rest of the offices at Blaw-Knox were weapons related he requested a lay-off from his organization. At the point when this was denied, he quit from his activity contending that he was unable to chip away at weapons without damaging the standards of his religion. In the wake of leavi ng his business he requested joblessness pay from the Indiana Employment Security.During his hearing, he pronounced that he felt that adding to the creation of arms damaged his religion. The meeting official inferred that Thomas’ strict conviction blocked him from creating or supporting straightforwardly in the assembling of things utilized in fighting. The ref anyway denied him his advantages on the ground that his end from business did not depend on great aim regarding his work as required by the Indiana resolution. The Board embraced the referee’s administering and denied the benefits.On request, the Indiana Court of Appeals turned around the choice of the board and decided that the subject Indiana resolution inappropriately troubled Thomas’ option to free exercise his religion. The Supreme Court of Indiana cleared the choice of the Court of Appeals and denied Thomas his advantages Decision: The State's forswearing of joblessness remuneration advantages to ca ndidate damaged his First Amendment option to free exercise of religion Reasons/Rationale In coming to this end result, the Supreme Court previously needed to respond to the inquiry whether Thomas in fact quit his work due to religion.It is all around settled that lone convictions established in religion are secured by the Free Exercise Clause. As indicated by the Supreme Court, the assurance anyway of what is a strict conviction or practice is as a rule a troublesome and sensitive assignment. The Supreme Court found that Thomas left work since he imagined that creation of arms disregarded his religion. For this situation, the arbitrator had discovered that Thomas quit his work because of his strict feelings. This was avowed by the Review Board.The Indiana Supreme Court anyway reasoned that Thomas had simply settled on an individual philosophical decision as opposed to a strict decision. It must be focused on that strict conviction isn't decreased to a philosophical decision simply in light of the fact that there are contrasts among the steadfast in their translation of their sacred writing. The reality in this manner that an associate didn't consider creation of weapons as a genuine infringement of their religions ought not influence Thomas’ purpose behind stopping his work. It is additionally unimportant and immaterial if the dependable is experiencing issues articulating his views.The free exercise of religion secured by the First Amendment isn't constrained to convictions which are shared by the entirety of the individuals. Having discarded the principal question, the subsequent inquiry is whether the rule damaged the free exercise of religion by Thomas. As per the Supreme Court, it is all around settled that when the state necessitates that specific lead is commanded by a strict confidence be first agreed to before an advantage is gotten or when it denies such an advantage in view of inability to follow such direct, the state is as a result putting a weight upon religion.In this case, on the off chance that we are to maintain the translation given on the Indiana resolution, at that point we are as a result expressing that the representative ought not leave for strict grounds else he won't be qualified for benefits. Despite the fact that the impulse practiced by the state for this situation is aberrant, the encroachment upon free exercise is in any case considerable. This anyway doesn't imply that the state can't limit the free exercise of religion. In the event that there are all the more convincing interest which could legitimize the state from confining the free exercise of religion then the weight might be allowed.The closes, in any case, don't legitimize the methods. For this situation, the purposes for the establishment of the resolution don't legitimize infringement of the free exercise of religion. There is no proof that will demonstrate that the quantity of individuals who end up in the scrape of picking among advanta ges and strict convictions is sufficiently huge to make broad joblessness or even to genuinely influence joblessness which is dreaded by the lower courts. There is hence no intrigue more significant than the free exercise of religion.Neither is there any legitimacy on the contention that to urge the installment of advantages to Thomas will add up to cultivating a strict confidence. The award of advantages given to Thomas is a minor insistence of the commitment of the state to get unbiased in issues of the strict confidence of the individuals. Contradicting Opinion of Justice Rehnquist Justice Rehnquist proclaimed that the finish of the greater part that the State of Indiana is naturally required to give direct monetary help to an individual exclusively on account of his strict convictions really adds mud to the effectively muddied waters of the First Amendment.According to him this revelation of the larger part is obviously incorrect as it doesn't resolve the strain between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause of the constitution. It is the dispute of Justice Rehnquist that the lion's share read the Free Exercise Clause too comprehensively. In spite of the fact that it maintained the free exercise of religion by Thomas, it anyway in actuality damaged the prerequisites of the Establishment Clause by leaning toward religion over another.

Diversity challenges faced in the workplace - Free Essay Example

Diversity in the workplace means when people are getting employed without discrimination i.e. on the basis of gender, age, and ethnic, cultural background, sexual orientation, religious belief or the racial background. Diversity also refers to the other ways such as level of education, experience in life, their social economic background, also their personality and status. Work experience and marital status also covers diversity (Hostager Meuse 2008). Basically workplace diversity means identifying the values of different individuals and managing them in the environment called workplace. Managing the diversity at workplace means creating that kind of environment that make use of contribution of people with different backgrounds (DeSouza 2008). So, organizations main perspective is to develop those strategies that can include different background, their perspectives and the family responsibilities for their employees (Hostager Meuse 2008). They also need to recognize all the contribution that diversity has made for the purposed of generating new ideas and the technique of doing things. Diversity also covers the policy of equal employment opportunity (EEO). All the policies related to the equal employment opportunity are important foundation for the workplace diversity policy (Hostager Meuse 2008). HOW DOES WORKPLACE DIVERSITY FIT INTO THE WIDER ORGANIZATION? Principles of workplace diversity should be incorporated with and highlight all the aspects of human resource management (DeSouza 2008). Aspects can be planning, selection, recruitment, performance appraisal, training and development etc (Hostager Meuse 2008). All the organization should show their commitment to diversity and should integrate a flexible working condition which allows their employees to balance their work and other responsibilities in the organization. Basically, workplace diversity strategies help the organization to build the relationship with the community and to enhance the contribution of its employees (DeSouza 2008). It also helps in improving the quality of its programs, products and the services delivered (Hostager Meuse 2008). Successful organizations main focus is to inculcate and embed the main principles of diversity in their cultures and the management system. These principles of diversity really values for the organization same ways as they do business (DeSouza 2008). One can easily see the reflection of diversity in their approach to people management. This is the center element in leadership which is reinforced through performance feedback and assessment. BENEFITS OF WORKPLACE DIVERSITY Any organizations success and competitiveness depends on the ability to adapt the diversity and realize their benefits. When organization actively assesses their workplace diversity issues and implementation of these diversity plans, some of the benefits can easily be reported which are as follows: Increase in Adaptability Large number of solutions with different variety can be supplied to the problems in service just by employing the diverse workforce in an organization. For sourcing and allocating resources solutions can be provided (Hostager Meuse 2008). Employers from diverse background not only bring the individual talents but also the experiences in suggesting the ideas which are flexible in adapting to the markets which are fluctuating and also the demands of the customer (DeSouza 2008). Broader service range Diversity also provides globalization. Diverse collection of employees in an organization provides diverse collection of skills which allows a company to provide the services to customers on global basis. Multiplicity of viewpoints Diverse workforce also feels comfortable while communicating with varying points of view which also provides the large number of ideas and experience (Hostager Meuse 2008). An organization can look at those ideas and views to meet the business strategy needs of the organization (DeSouza 2008). It also meets the needs of the customer more effectively. More Successful Execution Diversity at workplace also encourages the employees of the companies to perform to their highest ability (Hostager Meuse 2008). Strategies can then be executed company-wide which results in higher productivity, profit and also the return on investment. CHALLENGES OF DIVERSITY IN THE WORKPLACE For taking the advantages of the benefits of diversity at workplace, one has to face lots of challenges. Some of the challenges are as follows: Communication Problems Cultural and language barriers need to be overcome for successfully diversity programs to succeed. Ineffective communication results in confusion, lack of team work and also the low morale. Resistance to change In an organization there are always some people who will refuse to accept that social and cultural makeup of their workplace is changing day by day (Hostager Meuse 2008). Old and traditional ways mentally silences the new ideas and also inhibits the progress of the organization. Implementation of Diversity in the Workplace Implementation of diversity in the workplace is a intervening challenge to all the advocates of diversity (DeSouza 2008). With the right use of employee assessments and research data advocates must build the customized strategy to maximize the effects of diversity in the workplace for their particular organization. Successful Management of Diversity in the Workplace A strategy must be created and executed to create the civilization of diversity that filter through every department and the function of the organization (Hostager Meuse 2008). Training of diversity alone is not sufficient for the organizations diversity management plan. STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING DIVERSITY IN AN ORGANIZATION Assessment of diversity in the workplace Top companies and organization make assessing and evaluating their diversity as the internal part of the organization and the management system. An employee satisfaction survey can easily accomplish the assessment for the company efficiently. It also helps the management team to decide which challenges and obstacles to diversity are present in your workplace (Hostager Meuse 2008). It also determines which policies are to be added and which policies to be eliminated. Now to check the success of the workplace plan implementation, reassessment can be done. Development of diversity in the workplace plan Selecting the survey contributor or the provider that offers comprehensive reporting is the key decision for organization. This report will be the beginning structure of your diversity in the workplace plan. The plan made must be complete, inclusive, attainable and measurable as well. It is the organization that will decide what changes need to be made and also the timeline for the change to be attained. Implementation of diversity in the workplace plan The most important commitment is of the executive and the managerial commitment which is must for the organization (DeSouza 2008). Leaders and managers of different departments must add in various diversity policies into every aspect of the organizations utility and purpose. Another important task is the management cooperation and the participation which is required to create culture which is advantageous to the success of the organization plan. WORKPLACE DIVERSITY SOLUTIONS If possible involve all the employees in the organization in putting together and executing the diversity initiatives in the workplace (Hostager Meuse 2008). Encouraging employees of different department, to freely express their ideas and opinions, which give them, sense of equality among them. Training for the employees, this can be used to shape up various diversity policies in the organization. Assessment results to build and implement successful diversity in the workplace policies. As the economy is becoming global, the workforce in the organization is becoming increasingly diverse as well (Hostager Meuse 2008). Success and competitiveness of the organization depends on the capability to manage the diversity in the workforce effectively. Evaluating organizations diversity policies and plan for the future. CONCLUSION A diverse workforce is a reflection of a changing world these days. Diverse workforce in the organization brings the high values to the organization. Giving respect to all the nationalities working in the organization will benefit the workplace just by creating a competitive edge and also the increase in productivity as well (DeSouza 2008). By managing diversity at workplace benefits the employees by creating a fair and safe environment for them. Everyone in the organization has the access to opportunities and the challenges. Management tools in a diverse workforce should be used for giving education to all the employees about diversity and its issues which includes law and education (DeSouza 2008). Around the world, most of the places are made up of diverse cultures. So organization should learn how to adapt to them.

My Statement of Purpose for a Course on Networks and IP...

Statement of Purpose Introduction From an early age I learned to look at challenges not as insurmountable problems, but as opportunities for continual growth, personal discovery, and ultimately achievement. This mindset of translating challenges pervades my academic career to this point, and in pursuing a Masters of Science degree I hope to challenge myself to the next level of academic and professional achievement. Networks and IP Security The innate strengths I have include the ability to create, critique and analyze algorithms for optimal performance, in addition to router ripping, protocol analysis and understanding of and interest in data structures and data models. I have excelled in the areas of electric circuitry design and components, and have also discovered an innate ability to troubleshoot problems from a systemic, highly focused standpoint. This ability to view entire networks and the Internet from a very detailed, systemic standpoint has also helped me to excel in related studies of programming, data structures and algorithm development. The study of security has been based on the insights gained from viewing the many functional areas of networks through the perspective of fault tolerance, authentication, advanced connectivity and the development of data structures that enable communication and collaboration (Adams, 1986). My passion is in the area of computer networks and security, which is an area I will continually strive to excel in, relying onShow MoreRelatedApplication Of Window Server Administration Essay3980 Words   |  16 Pagesreliability, and performance to deploy a secure networking environment. There are many problems exist in deployment of client/server model into organization especially when some user want to access their office computer from remote places. 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PERIOD OF ATTACHMENT: AUGUST TO NOVEMBER 2012  © November 15, 2012TABLE OF CONTENTSDeclaration †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ | | Dedication †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Read MoreIct Attachment Report5159 Words   |  21 PagesPARTIAL FULFILMENT FOR THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE AWARD OF A DEGREE IN BUSINESS AND BUSINESS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY – December 2012 DECLARATION This is my original work and has not been presented to any university for academic purpose. 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web dubois - 1041 Words

February 4, 2014 Sociology 1000 Chapter 1- In Text Questions 1.How do the perspectives of people from different cultures differ on social issues such as suicide? How does the psychological perspective view suicide? What is unique about the sociologist s perspective? On a social issue such as suicide, cultures differ because many people feel this is a personal problem whereas others feel that this can be a public issue. If a person commits suicide, it may have been as a result of his or her personal problems. In a larger society, this suicide is a public issue because the person who committed suicide is not the only one that may be affected. Sociologist Emile Durkheim perspective of suicide was that the issue was related to†¦show more content†¦Marx stressed that history is a continuous clash between conflicting ideas and forces. He believed that conflict is necessary in order to produce social change and a better society. Ax Weber said that sociology should be value free and people should become more aware of how others see the world. Marx and Max Weber shared the similarities that exist was that they both felt like sociology should be studied but in different ways. They both studied on social change in society and agreed on the idea of the economy causing class conflict. 7.What role did Auguste Comte play in the development of sociology? Why did Harriet Martineau receive little recognition in the field of sociology for many years? Auguste Comte played a role in the development of society. He is considered the founder of sociology by his theory that societies contain social statics and social dynamics. He unlocked secrets of society. He was praised for his advocacy of sociology and insights. Harriet Martineau received little recognition in the field of sociology for many years due to the fact that she was a woman in a make-dominated discipline and society. 8.What is class conflict? 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DuBois believed that blacks should fight for their rights by being intellectualRead MoreComparison of Booker T. Washingtons Up from Slavery and Web Dubois The Souls of Black Folk871 Words   |  4 Pagesspeak out on their beliefs for change; Booker T. Washington and WEB Dubois, however, did not possess such fears — both thoroughly articulated their opinions and stood for what they believed was right. Booker T. Washington and WEB Dubois shared a few commonalities — both men were highly educated, for example, as well as they both expressed strong opposition against segregation. Washington’s Up from Slavery: An Autobiography and Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk outline each of these powerful historicalRead MoreThe Historical Factors That Shaped Web Dubois Quest For Liberal Arts Education And Bo oker T. Washington s Acceptance1537 Words   |  7 Pagesshaped WEB Dubois quest for Liberal Arts education and Booker T. Washington s acceptance of technical training. W.E.B Dubois and Booker T. Washington contradictory views with one objective and problem for African Americans were education systems. With the help of Booker T Washington and W.E.B Dubois African Americans education would change for the better. William Edward Burghardt Dubois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868 of French descent and like most African Americans Dubois wasRead MoreInsanity of Blanche Dubois918 Words   |  4 PagesBlanche Dubois The movie â€Å"A Streetcar Named Desire† contains many elements of insanity. The character that displays the most tragic insanity is Blanche Dubois. Blanche is from Laurel, Mississippi were she loses her home Belle Reve, after the death of her relatives. She then travels to her sister’s home where her actions lead her to insanity. She goes to her sister home as a fallen woman of society. She has a difficult time distinguishing between what is real and what is fantasy. 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The main character of the play is Ms. Blanche Dubois, a widowed, middle age, â€Å"southern bell† hiding from her own reality. Stella, Blanche’s younger sister is married to an animal, Stanley Kowalski. Mitch, Stanley’s friend, is Blanche’s last chance at happiness that she will never reach. According toRead MoreTennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire929 Words   |  4 PagesNamed Desire is a web of themes, complicated scenarios, and clashes between the characters. Therefore, it might’ve been somehow difficult to find out who the protagonist of this play is if it wasn’t for Aristotle’s ideas of a good tragedy because neither of the main characters, Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois, is completely good nor bad. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, a good tragedy requires the protagonist to undergo a change of status which only happens with Blanche Dubois. From my point of

IOT-Home Automation System-Free-Samples-Myassignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the IOT Home Automation. Answer: Introduction Internet of things or IOT makes use of the internet in controlling or monitoring the different devices remotely (Yang, 2014). Home Automation system is an excellent example of Internet of things and is widely used in modern houses for controlling the household appliances. With the application of Internet of things, the house can be controlled simply with a Smartphone or a wireless remote. Problem definition The major problem of physical controlling of the household devices is that, it becomes impossible to keep a track of the applications running within the house. This is particularly because of the location of the convectional wall switches that are widespread over the whole household. Thus, it makes the process more difficult to control. Moreover, accessing or operating the switches might be difficult for the aged and physically disabled members of the house. Automating the Home appliances using internet of things will particularly help in dealing with the problem more efficiently and thus this project is proposed. Solution with features Home Automation system will help to deal with the problem stated above as it not only control the appliances running within a household but also ensures the security of the house. It helps in ensuring that all the doors and windows of the house are closed. Home automation system provides certain additional benefits such as feeding the pets in the house, automating the doorbell by sending an email and so on (Lee et al., 2013). Figure 1: Representing the Home Automation System Source: (Gurek et al., 2013) The most striking features of the proposed project Home Automation system are elaborated below (Domingo, 2012) - 1) The system controls all the appliances present in a household over wife or internet. It is done by connecting a microcontroller with every devices present within the house. 2) The whole system can be controlled using a Smartphone app. Reminder and automatic switching on and off features in the devices can be set with the help of the app. 3) This system gives remote accessibility to the household devices. The owner can control his or her house or feed their pets sitting at the office. 4) This system helps in energy management of the appliances running in the house by ensuring their timely switch on and off automatically. This helps in efficient energy management and helps in reducing the utility expenses. 5) the most significant feature of home automation system is that it helps in connecting all the electronic devices together so as they perform as a unified system (Want, Schilit Jenson, 2015). 6) The system is upgradable and thus there is no significant problem if the house incorporates ore appliances or the people of the house move to another house in future. How it works? Home automation system makes the use of a strong dealer network to tie and control every appliances of the house. This network coordinates with all the appliances and controls it over the internet. This is ascertained by attaching a microcontroller with the appliances and the devices present in the house. This microcontroller is generally connected with the system over Wi-Fi. The user sends commands to the devices over this network. For controlling the appliances like fan and light of the rooms, a sensor is attached with the appliances that monitor the presence of human in the room. It switches on automatically when a person enters the rooms and switches off when nobody in present in the room (Lee et al., 2013). This can be controlled by a wireless remote or a Smartphone app according to the users wish. Figure 2: Representing the Wi-Fi based home automation system Source: (Gurek et al., 2013) Project Overview The system will be designed in such a way that it is able to sense and monitor all the present appliances in a house using a microcontroller and internet (Piyare, 2013). The structure of the project is elaborated below with the help of a diagram. Figure 3: Representing the structure of Wi-Fi based home automation system Source: (Gurek et al., 2013) The above picture clearly depicts how a home automation system works wirelessly over a strong Wi-Fi connection. Pros and cons The Pros of home automation system are elaborated below (ElShafee Hamed, 2012)- 1) It is convenient and easy to use. Once installed properly, it requires less or negligible maintenance. 2) The system ensures proper security of the house with the features of automatic closing of doors and windows present in the house. 3) Helps in proper energy management in the house and makes the house a comfortable place to stay in. The Cons of this system are as follows- 1) Heavy installation cost and complex installation procedure. 2) The whole system fails if one connection is hampered. Conclusion Therefore, form the above discussion, it can be concluded that this project can be safely implemented to increase the efficiency and comfort of the home. It has widespread advantages and is easy to operate. It System will mainly be beneficial for the elderly, disabled and working member of the house. However, the installation procedure is quite complex and needs proper monitoring. References Domingo, M. C. (2012). An overview of the Internet of Things for people with disabilities.Journal of Network and Computer Applications,35(2), 584-596. ElShafee, A., Hamed, K. A. (2012). Design and implementation of a WIFI based home automation system.World academy of science, engineering and technology,68, 2177-2180. Gurek, A., Gur, C., Gurakin, C., Akdeniz, M., Metin, S. K., Korkmaz, I. (2013, December). An android based home automation system. InHigh Capacity Optical Networks and Enabling Technologies (HONET-CNS), 2013 10th International Conference on(pp. 121-125). IEEE. Lee, G. M., Crespi, N., Choi, J. K., Boussard, M. (2013). Internet of things. InEvolution of Telecommunication Services(pp. 257-282). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Piyare, R. (2013). Internet of things: ubiquitous home control and monitoring system using android based smart phone.International Journal of Internet of Things,2(1), 5-11. Want, R., Schilit, B. N., Jenson, S. (2015). Enabling the internet of things.Computer,48(1), 28-35. Yang, S. H. (2014). Internet of things. InWireless Sensor Networks(pp. 247-261). Springer London.

My Sad Life Essays - Blood, Street Light, , Term Papers

My Sad Life The sun was setting. Far to the east, threatening black clouds arose from the fumes of pollution from the several smoke stacks towering over the city. The streets were pock marked and dented with the recent shower of acid rain. Hot boiling steam from the sewers made the temperature of day much hotter than it really was. Just outside the borders of the city is a lake covered with muck and crude oil spills. Death and despair floated aimlessly on the surface of the unhospitable body of water. Corpses of dead fish, seagulls... bobbed just under the rim of the black slime. The black slime sensing fresh prey, extended it's corrupt and revolting tendrils farther...until it caught another unsuspecting victim, choking and engulfing, destroying, leaving just another emtpy shell behind, devoid of any life. Night set in, the stars were obscured by thick blankets of smoke. The day was done. Stores got ready to lock up and street lights were turned on to aid the bread winners, so they may travel safely. Few were fortunate enough to own automobiles so they could avoid the cold dangerous streets and dark alleyways. Most shops were already abandoned, finished for the day. Yet few doors were still open, desperate for any last minute customers. One such shopkeeper was Phil Anderson. Anderson had worked as a pharmacist for most of his life. At forty, he had little to show for. The pollution that caused the gradual decay of the city had had negative effects on business, as well as the environment. Phil, though by all means not an old man, showed signs of premature aging. His skin was pale and dry, wrinkled by the everyday punishment of the deteriorating sorroundings. Few strands of grayish white hair lined his almost bald, dandruff infested scalp. Looking at Phil with his characteristic limp, slouched posture and bulging belly one might think him an extremely unathletic person. But then again it was not entirely his fault. His eyes were red and bloodshot, the glasses he wore only made these features more obvious. With shaking skinny hands, Phil slowly put away the last of the items on top of the counter. Finally done, he flicked off the lights and rummaged through his pockets for his keys. Looking one last time to make sure the shop was in order, Phil locked up the store and left. He failed t o notice a dark shadow spying on him as he counted the bills he had earned today, and put it away into his black leather wallet. The tall dark figure studied the pharmacist a while longer before trailing him. The narrow dirty street smelled of weeks old garbage and animal wastes. Smog was still thick in the air causing him to cough repeatedly. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath. Remembering his air filter in his pocket, Phil gingerly took it out and put it on. Feeling much better Phil continued down the street, heaving a sigh of relief. Bibliography none

The 11 Best Sites to Find Summer Internship

The 11 Best Sites to Find Summer Internship Summer is just around the corner, and that means it’s time to buckle down and think about what you’re going to do with your semester off. While you could spend it drinking beer and playing ping-pong, you could turn this summer into career crack by applying for the perfect internship for your future. Don’t know where to start? No worries. We’ve outlined the best free websites that will help you spend your summer wisely. #1 Way Up This site boasts a network of more than 250 universities and business partners, from Stanford to Nestle. The elaborate matching process ensures that you are fitted to the right company for your career goals. #2 Intern Queen This free site allows students to apply for high-profile internships in â€Å"the hippest cities† around the world. It also has an area for completing online internships in addition to internships abroad and with companies like Oprah Magazine. #3 Internships.com This site takes the basic idea of an internship search and brings it to the next level. Their â€Å"Internship Predictor† can help you pick the perfect internship based on your personality type and work style preference. #4 AAMC Summer Research Program For students who are pursuing medical education, a summer internship is vital to being accepted into the top medical schools. The Association of American Medical Colleges Summer Research Programs offers this great search option to match you up with a mentor in your chosen field to complete research between semesters. #5 Idealist For students who know that non-profit work is where they want to spend their time, there is no better place for job searching than this site. Idealist is all about helping students find the perfect paid or unpaid internship in a non-profit organization. #6 US Department of Justice Legal Internships Students preparing to enter into the legal field also need a top-notch internship to set them apart. Fortunately, the US Dept. of Justice provides this site to help you get hands-on experience with some of the most high-profile legal teams working today. #7 Media Bistro Students that are interested in careers in design, art, media, or production, Media Bistro is the perfect place to find a summer internship. This site collects internship opportunities from across the US for stations like PBS, CBS, and The Weather Channel. #8 Linkedin Internship Search For sheer volume of opportunities, no one can beat the LinkedIn Internship Search. The patented connection algorithms of LinkedIn also default to show you the most likely search results first – internships offered by people you know or their close friends. #9 FindSpark If you know that you want to spend your summer in NYC, FindSpark is the choice for you! This site is completely dedicated to internships and entry-level positions available in the City that Never Sleeps. Also, you can filter by the type of internship you want (paid, unpaid, college credit only). #10 Cool Works For the adventurous students, Cool Works is the perfect place to get great hands-on experience in the most unlikely of places. This site has both paid and unpaid internships in places like Alaska, the Adirondacks, and even on a Norwegian cruise vessel! # 11 Intern Jobs This site offers worldwide opportunities in almost every field of study. In addition, they provide a great Internship Guide to help you decide which internship will be the best for your career goals. Their Career Tools section also includes lots of great resources.

Critical Analysis of strategic Issues Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Critical Analysis of strategic Issues - Essay Example In conclusion, the report gives suggestions and recommendations on how the issues can be amicable. Oman national carrier, Oman Air started its operations in the year 1993. The organization primarily began operating in the local religion before expanding its services to other markets. Within a short period, the company had solidified its position as a leader in the airline industry. Since its formation, Oman Air has managed to transform Muscat into a major economic hub in the Middle East religion. In addition, the city has been able to tap into the numerous business opportunities that have emerged in the market. There has been an increase in population something that has brought up industrial, tourism and commercial business opportunities in the countries capital. Oman Air offers flight services for passengers traveling to different destinations in the world. However, the journey has not been rosy for the airline company. Serious challenges have faced the company in the recent days if unresolved could see the company’s fortunes dwindle. Competition and escalating fuel price s have been some of the challenges facing the airline company (Oman Air, 2015). Oman Air intends to be the leading airline company through the provision of quality services to its customers. In addition, the company hopes to link the world with the Omani and promote its cultural values globally (Oman Air, 2015). Oman Air has made a bold step to ensure provision of quality services to customers by exceeding the expectations of the customers. Reliability, safety, comfort and quality services are some of the factors that the company strives to employee secretly to attract more customers. In addition, the airline also seeks to be involved in community development projects in promoting of tourism activities (Oman Air, 2015). The industry has grown over the years. With the growth of the market, there has

Literature review in E-commerce in saudi arabia Assignment - 1

Literature review in E-commerce in saudi arabia - Assignment Example en established, but there is limited empirical research that assesses the e-commerce adoption in developing nations in the Arab word such as Saudi Arabia. The study examined the perception of mobile phone users and their concerns regarding the gadget’s authentication and security. The results supported various studies in the previous literature mobile devices authentication. Therefore, the users need an advanced security for their mobile devices. Adel A. B., Rayed A., and Salem A. (2014). Adoption Factors for e-Malls in the SME Sector in Al-Somali, S., Gholami. R. and Clegg B.T (2009). â€Å"An Investigation into the Acceptance of Online Banking in Saudi Arabia†, Technovation, 29 (2), 2009, pp.130-141. Rayed, A. Drew, and Waleed A. (2011). Factors Influencing E-Commerce Adoption by Retailers In Saudi Arabia: A Qualitative Analysis. The Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries. Rayed, A. Drew, S., and Alhussain, T. (2012). A Conceptual Framework for the Promotion of Trusted Online Retailing Environment in Saudi Arabia.International Journal of Business and Management. Retrieved February 8, 2012 from URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijbm.v7n5p140. Rayed, A., Nguyen, A., and Jones, J. (2013). A Study of Influential Factors in the Adoption and Diffusion of B2C E-Commerce. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications. Saudi Arabia .International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies. Zhu, K and Kraemer, K. (2005). â€Å"Post-Adoption Variations in Usage and Value of E-Business by Organizations: Cross- Country Evidence from the Retail Industry†, Information Systems Research, 16(1),2005, pp.

My Sisters Keeper Essay Example for Free

My Sisters Keeper Essay I am discussing the movie, â€Å"My Sisters Keeper,† the moral dilemma in the movie is not revealed until the end; Kate has put her sister Anna up to suing her parents for the rights of her own medical decisions so that in actuality Kate can die in peace; in essence voluntary passive euthanasia. The dilemma described in the movie is immoral based on the Categorical Imperative by Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative rejects the view that a person’s actions are good or bad based on solely on the consequences of those actions; Kantians emphasize that a person is praised or blamed for their actions based on the intentions with which they act. This film explores the medical, legal, ethical and moral issues related to long term illness and discusses some of the bioethical issues around the experimental technique known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. It presents many ethical dilemmas when a couple chooses to genetically engineer a baby to create a bone marrow match for their terminally ill daughter. That creation is Anna Fitzgerald, who is beginning to wonder about her place in the world and questions her on going donations in order to save her sister’s, Kate’s life. Anna feels that her existence is defined by her ability to save her sister. That type of knowledge of such form of conception must have some sort of psychological ramifications upon a growing child. If I knew that I was a test tube baby, it would make living a little less extraordinary because it takes away the romance of creating life. â€Å"Most babies are accidents. Not me. I was engineered, born to save my sisters life. †Those opening words are spoken by Anna Fitzgerald, an 11-year-old girl who was conceived in vitro as a genetic match for her leukemia-stricken older sister Kate. Whenever a part of Kate’s body fails, Anna’s parents Sara and Brian immediately offer up the needed part of Annas body for donation.

The Two Sagas of the Epic of Gilgamesh :: Epic Gilgamesh essays

The Two Sagas of Gilgamesh Western literature has few epics of any real greatness: readers can probably name most of them and count them on their hands with a few fingers left over. Of these, The Epic of Gilgamesh is by far the oldest. The standard version of the epic grandfathers Homer's Iliad and Odyssey by centuries. But what does it mean to call Gilgamesh an epic? By the standards of Homer's outline of an epic, Gilgamesh's tale could be seen as two distinctly different, yet drawn together sagas. "There is a hero of great national or even universal importance in a vast canvas, a setting that may be the whole world or larger." In the beginning we are introduced to our hero as not only the great king of Uruk, son of the goddess Ninsun and the great king, Lugalbanda, but also a great tyrant who became a hero. From the beginning of his story this man is destined for a fantastic journey that spans the worlds beyond what any of his peasants can dream to see. We are told that he is more godly than not, yet still must suffer the same fate as all mortals. With destiny set against his mortal, or physical life Gilgamesh must take the journey to the great cedar forest of Lebanon where he will prove his superior strength (and favor from the gods) to the world. "The plot involves battles involving superhuman deeds or a long, difficult journey while gods or other supernatural beings are interested and involved." Gilgamesh does encounter all of these things. Not once, but twice. In the first part of this tale he battles Humbaba, the feared giant who protects the trees of the cedar forest. Alongside him is his trusted friend, Enkido. Enkido was made by the gods, an equal of Gilgamesh which they planted in the wild as a man to grow strong in the wild of the animals. It is after Enkido has become Gilgamesh's friend that he complains of feeling weak from civilization, and gives Gilgamesh the idea of conquering something great to reclaim his strength and perpetuate their names. In this task they are also helped by Shamash; the god responsible for the cedar forest because he takes pity on Gilgamesh's mortality. Yet his story does not end at the defeat of Humbaba. Nor does it stop at the return of the mighty king of Uruk.

Advertising Impact

Quant Mark Econ (2009) 7:207–236 DOI 10. 1007/s11129-009-9066-z The effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality: An empirical investigation using panel data C. Robert Clark  · Ulrich Doraszelski  · Michaela Draganska Received: 11 December 2007 / Accepted: 2 April 2009 / Published online: 8 May 2009  © Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract We use a panel data set that combines annual brand-level advertising expenditures for over three hundred brands with measures of brand awareness and perceived quality from a large-scale consumer survey to study the effect of advertising.Advertising is modeled as a dynamic investment in a brand’s stocks of awareness and perceived quality and we ask how such an investment changes brand awareness and quality perceptions. Our panel data allow us to control for unobserved heterogeneity across brands and to identify the effect of advertising from the time-series variation within brands. They also allow us to account for the endogeneity of advertising through recently developed dynamic panel data estimation techniques. We ? nd that advertising has consistently a signi? cant positive effect on brand awareness but no signi? ant effect on perceived quality. Keywords Advertising  · Brand awareness  · Perceived quality  · Dynamic panel data methods JEL Classi? cation L15  · C23  · H37 C. R. Clark Institute of Applied Economics, HEC Montreal and CIRPEE, 3000 Chemin de la Cote-Sainte-Catherine, Montreal, Quebec H3T 2A7, Canada e-mail: robert. [email  protected] ca U. Doraszelski Department of Economics, Harvard University, 1805 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail: [email  protected] edu ) M. Draganska (B Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5015, USA e-mail: [email  protected] tanford. edu 208 C. R. Clark et al. 1 Introduction In 2006 more than $280 billion were spent on advertising in the U. S. , well above 2% of GDP. By inve sting in advertising, marketers aim to encourage consumers to choose their brand. For a consumer to choose a brand, two conditions must be satis? ed: First, the brand must be in her choice set. Second, the brand must be preferred over all the other brands in her choice set. Advertising may facilitate one or both of these conditions. In this research we empirically investigate how advertising affects these two conditions.To disentangle the impact on choice set from that on preferences, we use actual measures of the level of information possessed by consumers about a large number of brands and of their quality perceptions. We compile a panel data set that combines annual brand-level advertising expenditures with data from a large-scale consumer survey, in which respondents were asked to indicate whether they were aware of different brands and, if so, to rate them in terms of quality. These data offer the unique opportunity to study the role of advertising for a wide range of brands ac ross a number of different product categories.The awareness score measures how well consumers are informed about the existence and the availability of a brand and hence captures directly the extent to which the brand is part of consumers’ choice sets. The quality rating measures the degree of subjective vertical product differentiation in the sense that consumers are led to perceive the advertised brand as being better. Hence, our data allow us to investigate the relationship between advertising and two important dimensions of consumer knowledge.The behavioral literature in marketing has highlighted the same two dimensions in the form of the size of the consideration set and the relative strength of preferences (Nedungadi 1990; Mitra and Lynch 1995). It is, of course, possible that advertising also affects other aspects of consumer knowledge. For example, advertising may generate some form of subjective horizontal product differentiation that is unlikely to be re? ected in ei ther brand awareness or perceived quality. In a recent paper Erdem et al. (2008), however, report that advertising focuses on horizontal attributes only for one out of the 19 brands examined.Understanding the channel through which advertising affects consumer choice is important for researchers and practitioners alike for several reasons. For example, Sutton’s (1991) bounds on industry concentration in large markets implicitly assume that advertising increases consumers’ willingness to pay by altering quality perceptions. While pro? ts increase in perceived quality, they may decrease in brand awareness (Fershtman and Muller 1993; Boyer and Moreaux 1999), thereby stalling the competitive escalation in advertising at the heart of the endogenous sunk cost theory.Moreover, Doraszelski and Markovich (2007) show that even in small markets industry dynamics can be very different depending on the nature of advertising. From an empirical perspective, when estimating a demand mo del, advertising could be modeled Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality 209 as affecting the choice set or as affecting the utility that the consumer derives from a brand. If the role of advertising is mistakenly speci? ed as affecting quality perceptions (i. e. , preferences) rather than brand awareness as it often is, then the estimated parameters may be biased.In her study of the U. S. personal computer industry, Sovinsky Goeree (2008) ? nds that traditional demand models overstate price elasticities because they assume that consumers are aware of—and hence choose among—all brands in the market when in actuality most consumers are aware of only a small fraction of brands. For our empirical analysis we develop a dynamic estimation framework. Brand awareness and perceived quality are naturally viewed as stocks that are built up over time in response to advertising (Nerlove and Arrow 1962).At the same time, these stocks depreciate as consumers forget past advertising campaigns or as an old campaign is superseded by a new campaign. Advertising can thus be thought of as an investment in brand awareness and perceived quality. The dynamic nature of advertising leads us to a dynamic panel data model. In estimating this model we confront two important problems, namely unobserved heterogeneity across brands and the potential endogeneity of advertising. We discuss these below. When estimating the effect of advertising across brands we need to keep in mind that they are different in many respects.Unobserved factors that affect both advertising expenditures and the stocks of perceived quality and awareness may lead to spurious positive estimates of the effect of advertising. Put differently, if we detect an effect of advertising, then we cannot be sure if this effect is causal in the sense that higher advertising expenditures lead to higher brand awareness and perceived quality or if it is spurious in the sense that different brand s have different stocks of perceived quality and awareness as well as advertising expenditures.For example, although in our data the brands in the fast food category on average have high advertising and high awareness and the brands in the cosmetics and fragrances category have low advertising and low awareness, we cannot infer that advertising boosts awareness. We can only conclude that the relationship between advertising expenditures, perceived quality, and brand awareness differs from category to category or even from brand to brand. Much of the existing literature uses cross-sectional data to discern a relationship between advertising expenditures and perceived quality (e. g. Kirmani and Wright 1989; Kirmani 1990; Moorthy and Zhao 2000; Moorthy and Hawkins 2005) in an attempt to test the idea that consumers draw inferences about the brand’s quality from the amount that is spent on advertising it (Nelson 1974; Milgrom and Roberts 1986; Tellis and Fornell 1988). With cross -sectional data it is dif? cult to account for unobserved heterogeneity across brands. Indeed, if we neglect permanent differences between brands, then we ? nd that both brand awareness and perceived quality are positively correlated with advertising expenditures, thereby replicating the earlier studies.Once we make full use of our panel data and account for unobserved 210 C. R. Clark et al. heterogeneity, however, the effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality disappears. 1 Our estimation equations are dynamic relationships between a brand’s current stocks of perceived quality and awareness on the left-hand side and the brand’s previous stocks of perceived quality and awareness as well as its own and its rivals’ advertising expenditures on the right-hand side. In this context, endogeneity arises for two reasons.First, the lagged dependent variables are by construction correlated with all past error terms and therefore endogenous. As a consequence, traditional ? xed-effect methods are necessarily inconsistent. 2 Second, advertising expenditures may also be endogenous for economic reasons. For instance, media coverage such as news reports may affect brand awareness and perceived quality beyond the amount spent on advertising. To the extent that these shocks to the stocks of perceived quality and awareness of a brand feed back into decisions about advertising, say because the brand manager opts to advertise less if a news report has generated suf? ient awareness, they give rise to an endogeneity problem. To resolve the endogeneity problem we use the dynamic panel data methods developed by Arellano and Bond (1991), Arellano and Bover (1995), and Blundell and Bond (1998). The key advantage is that these methods do not rely on the availability of strictly exogenous explanatory variables or instruments. This is an appealing methodology that has been widely applied (e. g. , Acemoglu and Robinson 2001; Durlauf et al. 2005; Zhang and L i 2007) because valid instruments are often hard to come by. Further, since these methods involve ? st differencing, they allow us to control for unobserved factors that affect both advertising expenditures and the stocks of perceived quality and awareness and may lead to spurious positive estimates of the effect of advertising. In addition, our approach allows for factors other than advertising to affect a brand’s stock of perceived quality and awareness to the extent that these factors are constant over time. Our main ? nding is that advertising expenditures have a signi? cant positive effect on brand awareness but no signi? cant effect on perceived quality.These results appear to be robust across a wide range of speci? cations. Since awareness is the most basic kind of information a consumer can have for a brand, we conclude that an important role of advertising is information provision. On the other hand, our results indicate that advertising is not likely to alter consum ers’ quality perceptions. This conclusion calls for a reexamination of the implicit assumption underlying Sutton’s (1991) endogenous sunk cost theory. It also suggests that advertising should be modeled as affecting the choice set and not just utility when estimating demand.Finally, our ? ndings lend empirical 1 Another way to get around this issue is to take an experimental approach, as in Mitra and Lynch (1995). 2 This source of endogeneity is not tied to advertising in particular; rather it always arises in estimating dynamic relationships in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. An exception is the (rather unusual) panel-data setting where one has T > ? instead of N > ?. In this case the within estimator is consistent (Bond 2002, p. 5). Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality 211 upport to the view that advertising is generally procompetitive because it disseminates information about the existence, the price, and the attributes of product s more widely among consumers (Stigler 1961; Telser 1964; Nelson 1970, 1974). The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. In Sections 2 and 3 we explain the dynamic investment model and the corresponding empirical strategy. In Section 4 we describe the data and in Section 5 we present the results of the empirical analysis. Section 6 concludes. 2 Model speci? cation We develop an empirical model based on the classic advertising-as-investment model of Nerlove and Arrow (1962).Related empirical models are the basis of current research on advertising (e. g. , Naik et al. 1998; Dube et al. 2005; Doganoglu and Klapper 2006; Bass et al. 2007). Naik et al. (1998), in particular, ? nd that the Nerlove and Arrow (1962) model provides a better ? t than other models that have been proposed in the literature such as Vidale and Wolfe (1957), Brandaid (Little 1975), Tracker (Blattberg and Golanty 1978), and Litmus (Blackburn and Clancy 1982). We extend the Nerlove and Arrow (1962) framework in two respects. First, we allow a brand’s stocks of awareness and perceived quality to be affected by the advertising of its competitors.This approach captures the idea that advertising takes place in a competitive environment where brands vie for the attention of consumers. The advertising of competitors may also be bene? cial to a brand if it draws attention to the entire category and thus expands the relevant market for the brand (e. g. , Nedungadi 1990; Kadiyali 1996). Second, we allow for a stochastic component in the effect of advertising on the stocks of awareness and perceived quality to re? ect the success or failure of an advertising campaign and other unobserved in? uences such as the creative quality of the advertising copy, media selection, or scheduling.More formally, we let Qit be the stock of perceived quality of brand i at the start of period t and Ait the stock of its awareness. We further let Eit? 1 denote the advertising expenditures of brand i over the cou rse of period t ? 1 and E? it? 1 = (E1t? 1 , . . . , Ei? 1t? 1 , Ei+1t? 1 , . . . , Ent? 1 ) the advertising expenditures of its competitors. Then, at the most general level, the stocks of perceived quality and awareness of brand i evolve over time according to the laws of motion Qit = git (Qit? 1 , Eit? 1 , E? it? 1 , ? it ), Ait = hit (Ait? 1 , Eit? 1 , E? it? 1 , ? t ), where git ( ·) and hit ( ·) are brand- and time-speci? c functions. The idiosyncratic error ? it captures the success or failure of an advertising campaign along with all other omitted factors. For example, the quality of the advertising campaign may matter just as much as the amount spent on it. By recursively substituting 212 C. R. Clark et al. for the lagged stocks of perceived quality and awareness we can write the current stocks as functions of all past advertising expenditures and the current and all past error terms. This shows that these shocks to brand awareness and perceived quality are persistent ov er time.For example, the effect of a particularly good (or bad) advertising campaign may linger and be felt for some time to come. We model the effect of competitors’ advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality in two ways. First, we consider a brand’s â€Å"share of voice. † We use its advertising expenditures, Eit? 1 , relative to the average amount spent on advertising by rival brands in the brand’s subcategory or category, E? it? 1 . 3 To the extent that brands compete with each other for the attention of consumers, a brand may have to outspend its rivals to cut through the clutter.If so, then what is important may not be the absolute amount spent on advertising but the amount relative to rival brands. Second, we consider the amount of advertising in the entire market by including the average amount spent on advertising by rival brands in the brand’s subcategory or category. Advertising is market expanding if it attracts consumers to t he entire category but not necessarily to a particular brand. In this way, competitors’ advertising may have a positive in? uence on, say, brand awareness. Taken together, our estimation equations are Qit = ? i + ? t + ? Qit? 1 + f (Eit? 1 , E? it? 1 ) + ? t , Ait = ? i + ? t + ? Ait? 1 + f (Eit? 1 , E? it? 1 ) + ? it . (1) (2) Here ? i is a brand effect that captures unobserved heterogeneity across brands and ? t is a time effect to control for possible systematic changes over time. The time effect may capture, for example, that consumers are systematically informed about a larger number of brands due to the advent of the internet and other alternative media channels. Through the brand effect we allow for factors other than advertising to affect a brand’s stocks of perceived quality and awareness to the extent that these factors are constant over time.For example, consumers may hear about a brand and their quality perceptions may be affected by word of mouth. Similarl y, it may well be the case that consumers in the process of purchasing a brand become more informed about it and that their quality perceptions change, especially for high-involvement brands. Prior to purchasing a car, say, many consumers engage in research about the set of available cars and their respective characteristics, including quality ratings from sources such as car magazines and Consumer Reports.If these effects do not vary over time, then we fully account for them in our estimation because the dynamic panel data methods we employ involve ? rst differencing. The parameter ? measures how much of last period’s stocks of perceived quality and awareness are carried forward into this period’s stocks; 1 ? ? can 3 The Brandweek Superbrands survey reports on only the top brands (in terms of sales) in each subcategory or category. The number of brands varies from 3 for some subcategories to 10 for others. We therefore use the average, rather than the sum, of competit ors’ advertising.Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality 213 therefore be interpreted as the rate of depreciation of these stocks. Note that in the estimation we allow all parameters to be different across our estimation equations. For example, we do not presume that the carryover rates for perceived quality and brand awareness are the same. The function f ( ·) represents the response of brand awareness and perceived quality to the advertising expenditures of the brand and potentially also those of its rivals. In the simplest case absent competition we specify this function as 2 f (Eit? ) = ? 1 Eit? 1 + ? 2 Eit? 1 . This functional form is ? exible in that it allows for a nonlinear effect of advertising expenditures but does not impose one. Later on in Section 5. 6 we demonstrate the robustness of our results by considering a number of additional functional forms. To account for competition in the share-of-voice speci? cation, we set f Eit? 1 , E? it? 1 = ? 1 Eit? 1 E? it? 1 + ? 2 Eit? 1 E? it? 1 2 and in the total-advertising speci? cation, we set 2 f Eit? 1 , E? it? 1 = ? 1 Eit? 1 + ? 2 Eit? 1 + ? 3 E? it? 1 . Estimation strategy Equations 1 and 2 are dynamic relationships that feature lagged dependent variables on the right-hand side. When estimating, we confront the problems of unobserved heterogeneity across brands and the endogeneity of advertising. In our panel-data setting, ignoring unobserved heterogeneity is akin to dropping the brand effect ? i from Eqs. 1 and 2 and then estimating them by ordinary least squares. Since this approach relies on both cross-sectional and time-series variation to identify the effect of advertising, we refer to it as â€Å"pooled OLS† (POLS) in what follows.To account for unobserved heterogeneity we include a brand effect ? i and use the within estimator that treats ? i as a ? xed effect. We follow the usual convention in microeconomic applications that the term â€Å"? xed effectâ €  does not necessarily mean that the effect is being treated as nonrandom; rather it means that we are allowing for arbitrary correlation between the unobserved brand effect and the observed explanatory variables (Wooldridge 2002, p. 251). The within estimator eliminates the brand effect by subtracting the within-brand mean from Eqs. 1 and 2. Hence, the identi? ation of the slope parameters that determine the effect of advertising relies solely on variation over time within brands; the information in the between-brand cross-sectional relationship is not used. We refer to this approach as â€Å"? xed effects† (FE). While FE accounts for unobserved heterogeneity, it suffers from an endogeneity problem. In our panel-data setting, endogeneity arises for two reasons. First, since Eqs. 1 and 2 are inherently dynamic, the lagged stocks of perceived 214 C. R. Clark et al. quality and awareness may be endogenous. More formally, Qit? 1 and Ait? 1 are by construction correlated with ? s for s < t. The within estimator subtracts the within-brand mean from Eqs. 1 and 2. The resulting regressor, say Qit? 1 ? Qi in the case of perceived quality, is correlated with the error term ? it ? ?i since ? i contains ? it? 1 along with all higher-order lags. Hence, FE is necessarily inconsistent. Second, advertising expenditures may also be endogenous for economic reasons. For instance, media coverage such as news reports may directly affect brand awareness and perceived quality. Our model treats media coverage other than advertising as shocks to the stocks of perceived quality and awareness.To the extent that these shocks feed back into decisions about advertising, say because the brand manager opts to advertise less if a news report has generated suf? cient awareness, they give rise to an endogeneity problem. More formally, it is reasonable to assume that Eit? 1 , the advertising expenditures of brand i over the course of period t ? 1, are chosen at the beginning of perio d t ? 1 with knowledge of ? it? 1 and higher-order lags and that therefore Eit? 1 is correlated with ? is for s < t. We apply the dynamic panel-data method proposed by Arellano and Bond (1991) to deal with both unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity.This methodology has the advantage that it does not rely on the availability of strictly exogenous explanatory variables or instruments. This is welcome because instruments are often hard to come by, especially in panel-data settings: The problem is ? nding a variable that is a good predictor of advertising expenditures and is uncorrelated with shocks to brand awareness and perceived quality; ? nding a variable that is a good predictor of lagged brand awareness and perceived quality and uncorrelated with current shocks to brand awareness and perceived quality is even less obvious.The key idea of Arellano and Bond (1991) is that if the error terms are serially uncorrelated, then lagged values of the dependent variable and lagged values of the endogenous right-hand-side variables represent valid instruments. To see this, take ? rst differences of Eq. 1 to obtain Qit ? Qit? 1 = (? t ? ?t? 1 ) + ? (Qit? 1 ? Qit? 2 ) + f (Eit? 1 ) ? f (Eit? 2 ) + (? it ? ?it? 1 ), (3) where we abstract from competition to simplify the notation. Eliminating the brand effect ? i accounts for unobserved heterogeneity between brands. The remaining problem with estimating Eq. 3 by least-squares is that Qit? 1 ? Qit? is by construction correlated with ? it ? ?it? 1 since Qit? 1 is correlated with ? it? 1 by virtue of Eq. 1. Moreover, as we have discussed above, Eit? 1 may also be correlated with ? it? 1 for economic reasons. We take advantage of the fact that we have observations on a number of periods in order to come up with instruments for the endogenous variables. In particular, this is possible starting in the third period where Eq. 3 becomes Qi3 ? Qi2 = (? 3 ? ?2 ) + ? (Qi2 ? Qi1 ) + f (Ei2 ) ? f (Ei1 ) + (? i3 ? ?i2 ). Effect of adve rtising on brand awareness and perceived quality 215 In this case Qi1 is a valid instrument for (Qi2 ?Qi1 ) since it is correlated with (Qi2 ? Qi1 ) but uncorrelated with (? i3 ? ?i2 ) and, similarly, Ei1 is a valid instrument for ( f (Ei2 ) ? f (Ei1 )). In the fourth period Qi1 and Qi2 are both valid instruments since neither is correlated with (? i4 ? ?i3 ) and, similarly, Ei1 and Ei2 are both valid instruments. In general, for lagged dependent variables and for endogenous right-hand-side variables, levels of these variables that are lagged two or more periods are valid instruments. This allows us to generate more instruments for later periods. The resulting estimator is referred to as â€Å"difference GMM† (DGMM).A potential dif? culty with the DGMM estimator is that lagged levels may be poor instruments for ? rst differences when the underlying variables are highly persistent over time. Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998) propose an augmented estimator in which the original equations in levels are added to the system. The idea is to create a stacked data set containing differences and levels and then to instrument differences with levels and levels with differences. The required assumption is that brand effects are uncorrelated with changes in advertising expenditures.This estimator is commonly referred to as â€Å"system GMM† (SGMM). In Section 5 we report and compare results for DGMM and SGMM. It is important to test the validity of the instruments proposed above. Following Arellano and Bond (1991) we report a Hansen J test for overidentifying restrictions. This test examines whether the instruments are jointly exogenous. We also report the so-called difference-in-Hansen J test to examine speci? cally whether the additional instruments for the level equations used in SGMM (but not in DGMM) are valid. Arellano and Bond (1991) further develop a test for second-order serial correlation in the ? st differences of the error te rms. As described above, both GMM estimators require that the levels of the error terms be serially uncorrelated, implying that the ? rst differences are serially correlated of at most ? rst order. We caution the reader that the test for second-order serial correlation is formally only de? ned if the number of periods in the sample is greater than or equal to 5 whereas we observe a brand on average for just 4. 2 periods in our application. Our preliminary estimates suggest that the error terms are unlikely to be serially uncorrelated as required by Arellano and Bond (1991).The AR(2) test described above indicates ? rst-order serial correlation in the error terms. An AR(3) test for third-order serial correlation in the ? rst differences of the error terms, however, indicates the absence of second-order serial correlation in the error terms. 4 In this case, Qit? 2 and Eit? 2 are no longer valid instruments for Eq. 3. Intuitively, because Qit? 2 is correlated with ? it? 2 by virtue of Eq. 1 and ? it? 2 is correlated with ? it? 1 by ? rst-order serial correlation, Qit? 2 is correlated 4 Of course, the AR(3) test uses less observations than the AR(2) test and is therefore also less powerful. 16 C. R. Clark et al. with ? it? 1 in Eq. 3, and similarly for Eit? 2 . Fortunately, however, Qit? 3 and Eit? 3 remain valid instruments because ? it? 3 is uncorrelated with ? it? 1 . We carry out the DGMM and SGMM estimation using STATA’s xtabond2 routine (Roodman 2007). We enter third and higher lags of either brand awareness or perceived quality, together with third and higher lags of advertising expenditures as instruments. In addition to these â€Å"GMM-style† instruments, for the difference equations we enter the time dummies as â€Å"IV-style† instruments. We also apply the ? ite-sample correction proposed by Windmeijer (2005) which corrects for the two-step covariance matrix and substantially increases the ef? ciency of both GMM estimators. Finally, we compute standard errors that are robust to heteroskedasticity and arbitrary patterns of serial correlation within brands. 4 Data Our data are derived from the Brandweek Superbrands surveys from 2000 to 2005. Each year’s survey lists the top brands in terms of sales during the past year from 25 broad categories. Inside these categories are often a number of more narrowly de? ned subcategories. Table 1 lists the categories along with their subcategories.The surveys report perceived quality and awareness scores for the current year and the advertising expenditures for the previous year by brand. Perceived quality and awareness scores are calculated by Harris Interactive in their Equitrend brand-equity study. Each year Harris Interactive surveys online between 20, 000 and 45, 000 consumers aged 15 years and older in order to determine their perceptions of a brand’s quality and its level of awareness for approximately 1, 000 brands. 5 To ensure that the respondents accu rately re? ect the general population their responses are propensity weighted. Each respondent rates around 80 of these brands.Perceived quality is measured on a 0–10 scale, with 0 meaning unacceptable/poor and 10 meaning outstanding/ extraordinary. Awareness scores vary between 0 and 100 and equal the percentage of respondents that can rate the brand’s quality. The quality rating is therefore conditional on the respondent being aware of the brand. 6 5 The exact wording of the question is: â€Å"We will display for you a list of brands and we are asking you to rate the overall quality of each brand using a 0 to 10 scale, where ‘0’ means ‘Unacceptable/Poor Quality’, ‘5’ means ‘Quite Acceptable Quality’ and ‘10’ means ‘Outstanding/ Extraordinary Quality’.You may use any number from 0 to 10 to rate the brands, or use 99 for ‘No Opinion’ option if you have absolutely no opinion abou t the brand. † Panelists are being incentivized through sweepstakes on a periodic basis but are not paid for a particular survey. 6 The 2000 Superbrands survey does not separately report perceived quality and salience scores. We received these scores directly from Harris Interactive. 2000 is the ? rst year for which we have been able to obtain perceived quality and salience scores for a large number of brands.Starting with the 2004 and 2005 Superbrands surveys, salience is replaced by a new measure called â€Å"familiarity. † For these two years we received salience scores directly from Harris Interactive. The contemporaneous correlation between salience and familiarity is 0. 98 and signi? cant with a p-value of 0. 000. Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality Table 1 Categories and subcategories 1. Apparel 2. Appliances 3. Automobiles a. general automobiles b. luxury c. subcompact d. sedan/wagon e. trucks/suvs/vans 4. Beer, wine, liquor a. beer b. wine c. malternatives d. iquor 5. Beverages a. general b. new age/sports/water 6. Computers a. software b. hardware 7. Consumer electronics 8. Cosmetics and fragrances a. color cosmetics b. eye color c. lip color d. women’s fragrances e. men’s fragrances 9. Credit cards 10. Entertainment 11. Fast food 12. Financial services 13. Food a. ready to eat cereal b. cereal bars c. cookies d. cheese e. crackers f. salted snacks g. frozen dinners and entrees Items in italics have been removed 217 h. frozen pizza i. spaghetti sauce j. coffee k. ice cream l. refrigerated orange juice m. refrigerated yogurt n. oy drinks o. luncheon meats p. meat alternatives q. baby formula/electrolyte solutions r. pourable salad dressing 14. Footwear 15. Health and beauty a. bar soap b. toothpaste c. shampoo d. hair color 16. Household a. cleaner b. laundry detergents c. diapers d. facial tissue e. toilet tissue f. automatic dishwater detergent 17. Petrol a. oil companies b. automotive aftercare/ lube 18. Pharmaceutical OTC a. allergy/cold medicine b. stomach/antacids c. analgesics 19. Pharmaceutical prescription 20. Retail 21. Telecommunications 22. Tobacco 23. Toys 24. Travel 25. World Wide WebWe supplement the awareness and quality measures with advertising expenditures that are taken from TNS Media Intelligence and Competitive Media Reporting. These advertising expenditures encompass spending in a wide range of media: Magazines (consumer magazines, Sunday magazines, local magazines, and business-to-business magazines), newspaper (local and national newspapers), television (network TV, spot TV, syndicated TV, and network cable TV), radio (network, national spot, and local), Spanish-language media (magazines, newspapers, and TV networks), internet, and outdoor.After eliminating categories and subcategories where observations are not at the brand level (apparel, entertainment, ? nancial services, retail, world wide web) or where the data are suspect (tobacco), we are left w ith 19 categories (see again Table 1). We then drop all private labels and all brands for which 218 C. R. Clark et al. we do not have perceived quality and awareness scores as well as advertising expenditures for at least two years running. This leaves us with 348 brands. Table 2 contains descriptive statistics for the overall sample and also by category. In the overall sample the average awareness score is 69. 5 and the average perceived quality score is 6. 36. The average amount spent on advertising is around $66 million per year. There is substantial variation in these measures across categories. The variation in perceived quality (coef? cient of variation is 0. 11 overall, ranging from 0. 04 for appliances to 0. 13 for computers) tends to be lower than the variation in brand awareness (coef? cient of variation is 0. 28 overall, ranging from 0. 05 for appliances to 0. 46 for telecommunications), in line with the fact the quality rating is conditional on the respondent being aware of the brand.The contemporaneous correlation between brand awareness and perceived quality is 0. 60 and signi? cant with a p-value of 0. 000. The contemporaneous correlation between advertising expenditures and the change in brand awareness is 0. 0488 and signi? cant with a p-value of 0. 0985 and the contemporaneous correlation between advertising expenditures and the change in perceived quality is 0. 0718 and signi? cant with a p-value of 0. 0150. These correlations anticipate the spurious correlation between both brand awareness and perceived quality and advertising expenditures if permanent differences between brands are neglected (POLS estimator).We will see though that the effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality Table 2 Descriptive statistics # obs # brands Brand awareness Perceived Advertising (0–100) quality (0–10) ($1,000,000) Mean Std. dev. Mean Std. dev. Mean Std. dev. Overall Appliances Automobiles Beer, wine, liquor Beverages Computers Cons umer electronics Cosmetics and fragrances Credit cards Fast food Food Footwear Health and beauty Household Petrol Pharmaceutical OTC Pharmaceutical prescription Telecommunications Toys Travel 1,478 348 21 137 98 95 79 29 70 29 60 247 38 54 128 48 56 31 52 25 181 4 30 24 22 17 7 19 6 12 65 8 11 31 13 15 10 11 5 38 69. 5 85. 09 67. 81 62. 23 84. 57 59. 80 67. 83 49. 37 70. 97 93. 83 80. 18 64. 95 82. 50 73. 83 60. 52 76. 96 29. 97 49. 33 72. 12 59. 48 19. 43 4. 54 6. 72 10. 13 13. 84 23. 05 18. 68 15. 75 18. 08 5. 32 14. 94 18. 98 9. 80 16. 03 17. 19 13. 89 9. 69 22. 86 9. 74 15. 43 6. 36 7. 35 6. 51 5. 68 6. 51 6. 41 6. 60 5. 83 6. 24 6. 28 6. 66 6. 39 6. 67 6. 66 5. 95 6. 79 5. 54 5. 28 6. 95 6. 26 0. 70 0. 32 0. 59 0. 72 0. 58 0. 81 0. 73 0. 52 0. 73 0. 42 0. 65 0. 42 0. 41 0. 56 0. 30 0. 37 0. 67 0. 52 0. 32 0. 52 66. 21 118. 52 41. 87 33. 19 99. 85 64. 62 36. 78 45. 11 41. 33 42. 19 130. 43 130. 7 104. 83 160. 66 38. 02 47. 48 174. 54 109. 77 214. 80 156. 23 13. 93 13. 81 40. 27 46. 89 27. 28 33. 44 21. 80 25. 43 33. 54 34. 65 38. 71 18. 13 76. 23 36. 40 367. 93 360. 54 108. 55 54. 36 25. 41 25. 88 Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality 219 disappears once unobserved heterogeneity is accounted for (FE and GMM estimators). The intertemporal correlation is 0. 98 for brand awareness, 0. 95 for perceived quality, and 0. 93 for advertising expenditures. This limited amount of intertemporal variation warrants preferring the SGMM over the DGMM estimator.At the same time, however, it constrains how ? nely we can â€Å"slice† the data, e. g. , by isolating a brand-speci? c effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness and perceived quality. Since the FE, DGMM, and SGMM estimators rely on within-brand acrosstime variation, it is important to ensure that there is a suf? cient amount of within-brand variation in brand awareness, perceived quality, and advertising expenditures. Table 3 presents a decomposition of the standard devia tion in these variables into an across-brands and a within-brand component for the overall sample and also by category.The across-brands standard deviation is a measure of the cross-sectional variation and the within-brand standard deviation is a measure of the time-series variation. The across-brands standard deviation of brand awareness is about six times larger than the within-brand standard deviation. This ratio varies across categories and ranges from 2 for automobiles, beer, wine, liquor, and pharmaceutical prescription to 6 for health and beauty and pharmaceutical OTC. In case of perceived quality the ratio is about 4 (ranging from 1 for telecommunications to 5 for consumer electronics, credit cards, and household).Hence, while there is more crosssectional than time-series variation in our sample, the time-series variation is substantial for both brand awareness and perceived quality. Figure 1 illustrates Table 3 Variance decomposition Brand awareness (0–100) Across Ov erall Appliances Automobiles Beer, wine, liquor Beverages Computers Consumer electronics Cosmetics and fragrances Credit cards Fast food Food Footwear Health and beauty Household Petrol Pharmaceutical OTC Pharmaceutical prescription Telecommunications Toys Travel 20. 117 5. 282 6. 209 10. 181 13. 435 23. 094 19. 952 18. 054 19. 568 6. 132 16. 241 20. 417 10. 36 16. 719 20. 179 13. 339 9. 393 21. 659 11. 217 16. 063 Within 3. 415 1. 334 3. 281 4. 105 2. 915 3. 843 5. 611 3. 684 3. 903 1. 660 2. 255 4. 267 1. 772 3. 896 3. 669 2. 363 5. 772 5. 604 3. 589 3. 216 Perceived quality (0–10) Across 0. 726 0. 323 0. 561 0. 705 0. 582 0. 850 0. 800 0. 563 0. 788 0. 361 0. 702 0. 388 0. 397 0. 561 0. 415 0. 336 0. 753 0. 452 0. 360 0. 516 Within 0. 176 0. 148 0. 141 0. 186 0. 190 0. 313 0. 167 0. 208 0. 159 0. 202 0. 134 0. 167 0. 136 0. 113 0. 116 0. 129 0. 230 0. 334 0. 127 0. 153 Advertising ($1,000,000) Across 100. 823 28. 965 54. 680 41. 713 37. 505 110. 362 105. 49 38. 446 118. 05 9 159. 306 15. 655 45. 791 27. 054 18. 789 27. 227 16. 325 38. 648 317. 434 61. 419 22. 136 Within 43. 625 21. 316 32. 552 12. 406 13. 372 65. 909 114. 381 20. 053 43. 415 33. 527 7. 998 7. 640 19. 075 16. 672 20. 496 9. 080 27. 919 178. 406 18. 584 10. 909 220 .025 . 2 C. R. Clark et al. .02 Density . 01 . 015 0 .005 0 20 40 60 80 Mean brand awareness 100  ® 0 –30 .05 Density . 1 .15 –20 –10 0 10 20 Demeaned brand awareness 30  ® .8 .6 Density . 4 0 .2 0 2 4 6 Mean perceived quality 8 10  ® 0 –1. 5 1 Density 2 3 –1 –. 5 0 . 5 1 Demeaned perceived quality 1. 5  ® .015 Density . 005 . 01 0 0 00 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 Mean advertising expenditures (millions of $)  ® 0 –600 –400 –200 0 200 400 600 Demeaned advertising expenditures (millions of $)  ® Fig. 1 Variance decomposition. Histogram of brand-mean of brand awareness, perceived quality, and advertising expenditures (left panels) and histogram of de-mean ed brand awareness, perceived quality, and advertising expenditures (right panels) the decomposition for the overall sample. The left panels show histograms of the brand-mean of brand awareness, perceived quality, and advertising expenditures and the right panels show histograms of the de-meaned variables.Again it is evident that the time-series variation is substantial for both brand awareness and perceived quality. 5 Empirical results In Tables 4 and 5 we present a number of different estimates for the effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness and perceived quality, .005 Density . 01 . 015 .02 .025 Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality Table 4 Brand awareness POLS Lagged brand awareness Advertising Advertising2 Marginal effect of advertising at: Mean 25th pctl. 50th pctl. 75th pctl. Advertising test: ? 1 = ? 2 = 0 Speci? ation tests: Hansen J Difference-in-Hansen J Arellano & Bond AR(2) Arellano & Bond AR(3) Goodness of ? t measures: R2 -within R2 -between R2 # obs # brands FE DGMM SGMM 221 0. 942*** 0. 223*** 0. 679*** 0. 837*** (0. 00602) (0. 0479) (0. 109) (0. 0266) 0. 00535*** 0. 00687 0. 0152 0. 00627** (0. 00117) (0. 00443) (0. 0139) (0. 00300) ? 0. 00000409*** ? 0. 00000139 ? 0. 0000105 ? 0. 00000524** (0. 000000979) (0. 00000332) (0. 00000745) (0. 00000239) 0. 00481*** (0. 00107) 0. 00527*** (0. 00116) 0. 00514*** (0. 00113) 0. 00470*** (0. 00105) Reject*** 0. 00668 (0. 00412) 0. 00684 (0. 00438) 0. 00679 (0. 00430) 0. 00664 (0. 0405) 0. 0138 (0. 0129) 0. 0150 (0. 0138) 0. 0147 (0. 0135) 0. 0136 (0. 00127) 0. 00558** (0. 00269) 0. 00617** (0. 00296) 0. 00600** (0. 00288) 0. 00544** (0. 00263) Do not reject Do not reject Reject* Do not reject Do not reject Reject** Reject** Do not reject Do not reject 0. 494 0. 940 0. 851 1,148 317 Reject*** 0. 969 1,148 317 819 274 1,148 317 Standard errors in parenthesis * p = 0. 10; ** p = 0. 05; *** p = 0. 01 respectively. Starting with the simplest case absent competition, we present estimates of ? , ? 1 , and ? 2 (the coef? cients on Qit? 1 or Ait? 1 and Eit? 1 and 2 Eit? 1 ) along with the marginal effect ? 1 + 2? Eit? 1 calculated at the mean and the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of advertising expenditures. The POLS estimates in the ? rst column of Tables 4 and 5 suggest a signi? cant positive effect of advertising expenditures on both brand awareness and perceived quality. In both cases we also reject the null hypothesis that advertising plays no role in determining brand awareness and perceived quality (? 1 = ? 2 = 0). Of course, as mentioned above, POLS accounts for neither unobserved heterogeneity nor endogeneity. In the next columns of Tables 4 and 5 we present FE, DGMM, and SGMM estimates that attend to these issues. 7 7 The stimates use at most 317 out of 348 brands because we restrict the sample to brands with data for two years running but use third and higher lags of brand awareness respectively perceived quality and advertising expendit ures as instruments. Different sample sizes are reported for the DGMM and SGMM estimators. Sample size is not a well-de? ned concept in SGMM since this estimator essentially runs on two different samples simultaneously. The xtabond2 routine in STATA reports the size of the transformed sample for DGMM and of the untransformed sample for SGMM. 222 Table 5 Perceived quality FE 0. 391*** (0. 0611) 0. 659*** (0. 204) 1. 47*** (0. 0459) 0. 981*** (0. 0431) DGMM SGMM Objective quality Brand awareness POLS Lagged perceived quality 0. 970*** (0. 0110) Brand awareness Advertising Advertising2 0. 000218** (0. 0000952) ? 0. 000000133 (0. 000000107) 0. 0000822 (0. 000198) 0. 0000000408 (0. 000000162) ?0. 0000195 (0. 000969) 0. 000000108 (0. 000000945) 0. 0000219 (0. 000205) 0. 0000000571 (0. 000000231) 0. 0000649 (0. 000944) 0. 0000000807 (0. 00000308) 0. 937*** (0. 0413) 0. 00596*** (0. 00165) ? 0. 000298 (0. 000256) 0. 000000319 (0. 000000267) Marginal effect of advertising at: Mean 25th pctl. 50th pctl. 75th pctl. 0. 0002** (0. 0000819) 0. 000215** (0. 000933) 0. 000211** (0. 00009) 0. 0001965** (0. 0000793) Do not reject Do not reject Reject*** Do not reject Do not reject Do not reject Reject** Reject** Reject*** Do not reject 0. 0000877 (0. 000180) 0. 000083 (0. 000195) 0. 0000844 (0. 000191) 0. 0000887 (0. 000177) ?5. 13e? 06 (0. 000848) ? 0. 0000174 (0. 000952) ? 0. 0000139 (0. 000922) ? 2. 32e? 06 (0. 000825) 0. 0000295 (0. 000176) 0. 0000230 (0. 000201) 0. 0000249 (0. 000194) 0. 0000310 (0. 000170) 0. 0000594 (0. 000740) 0. 0000642 (0. 000917) 0. 0000623 (0. 000847) 0. 0000588 (0. 000714) Do not reject Do not reject Do not reject Reject*** Do not reject ?0. 000256 (0. 000222) ? 0. 00292 (0. 000251) ? 0. 000282 (0. 000242) ? 0. 000248 (0. 000215) Do not reject Reject** Do not reject Reject*** Do not reject Advertising test: ? 1 = ? 2 = 0 Speci? cation tests: Hansen J Difference-in-Hansen J Arellano & Bond AR(2) Arellano & Bond AR(3) Goodness of ? t measures: R2 -wi thin R2 -between R2 # obs # brands 0. 180 0. 952 0. 909 1,148 317 819 274 1,148 317 Reject** 0. 914 1,148 317 604 178 1,148 317 C. R. Clark et al. Standard errors in parenthesis. SGMM estimates in columns labeled â€Å"Objective quality† and â€Å"Brand awareness† * p = 0. 10; ** p = 0. 05; *** p = 0. 01 Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality 23 Regardless of the class of estimator we ? nd a signi? cant positive effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness. With the FE estimator we ? nd that the marginal effect of advertising on awareness at the mean is 0. 00668. It is borderline signi? cant with a p-value of 0. 105 and implies an elasticity of 0. 00638 (with a standard error of 0. 00392). A one-standard-deviation increase of advertising expenditures increase brand awareness by 0. 0408 standard deviations (with a standard error of 0. 0251). The rate of depreciation of a brand’s stock of awareness is estimated to be 1–0. 22 3 or 78% per year.The FE estimator identi? es the effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness solely from the within-brand across-time variation. The problem with this estimator is that it does not deal with the endogeneity of the lagged dependent variable on the right-hand side of Eq. 2 and the potential endogeneity of advertising expenditures. We thus turn to the GMM estimators described in Section 3. We focus on the more ef? cient SGMM estimator. The coef? cient on the linear term in advertising expenditures is estimated to be 0. 00627 ( p-value 0. 037) and the coef? cient on the quadratic term is estimated to be ? . 00000524 ( p-value 0. 028). These estimates support the hypothesis that the relationship between advertising and awareness is nonlinear. The marginal effect of advertising on awareness is estimated to be 0. 00558 ( p-value 0. 038) at the mean and implies an elasticity of 0. 00533 (with a standard error of 0. 00257). A one-standard-deviation increase of adve rtising expenditures increases brand awareness by 0. 0340 standard deviations (with a standard error of 0. 0164). The rate of depreciation decreases substantially after correcting for endogeneity and is estimated to be 1? . 828 or 17% per year, thus indicating that an increase in a brand’s stock of awareness due to an increase in advertising expenditures persists for years to come. The Hansen J test for overidentifying restrictions indicates that the instruments taken together as a group are valid. Recall from Section 3 that we must assume that an extra condition holds in order for the SGMM estimator to be appropriate. The difference-in-Hansen J test con? rms that it does, as we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the additional instruments for the level equations are valid.While we reject the hypothesis of no second-order serial correlation in the error terms, we cannot reject the hypothesis of no thirdorder serial correlation. This result further validates our instrument ing strategy. However, one may still be worried about the SGMM estimates because DGMM uses a strict subset of the orthogonality conditions of SGMM and we reject the Hansen J test for the DGMM estimates (see Table 4). From a formal statistical point of view, rejecting the smaller set of orthogonality conditions in DGMM is not conclusive evidence that the larger set of orthogonality conditions in SGMM are invalid (Hayashi 2000, pp. 18–221). In Fig. 2 we plot the marginal effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness over the entire range of advertising expenditures for our SGMM estimates along with a histogram of advertising expenditures. For advertising expenditures between $400 million and $800 million per year the marginal effect of advertising on awareness is no longer signi? cantly different from zero 224 C. R. Clark et al. Marginal effect –. 004 0 . 004 0 200 400 600 800 1000 Advertising expenditures (millions of $) 1200 1400 arginal effect of advertising l ower 90% confidence limit . 015 upper 90% confidence limit 0 0 .005 Density . 01 200 400 600 800 1000 Advertising expenditures (millions of $) 1200 1400  ® Fig. 2 Pointwise con? dence interval for the marginal effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness (upper panel) and histogram of advertising expenditures (lower panel). SGMM estimates and, statistically, it is actually negative for very high advertising expenditures over $800 million per year. The former case covers around 1. 9% of observations and the latter less than 0. 5%.One possible interpretation is that brands with very high current advertising expenditures are those that are already wellknown (perhaps because they have been heavily advertised over the years), so that advertising cannot further boost their awareness. Indeed, average awareness for observations with over $400 million in advertising expenditures is 74. 94 as compared to 69. 35 for the entire sample. Turning from brand awareness in Table 4 to perce ived quality in Table 5, we see that the positive effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality found by the POLS estimator disappears once unobserved eterogeneity is accounted by the FE, DGMM, and SGMM estimators. In fact, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that advertising plays no role in determining perceived quality. Figure 3 graphically illustrates the absence of an effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality at the margin for our DGMM estimates. While the effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality is very imprecisely estimated, it appears to be economically insigni? cant: The implied elasticity is ? 0. 0000534 (with a standard error of 0. 00883) and a one-standarddeviation increase of advertising expenditures decrease perceived quality byEffect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality 225 Marginal effect –. 001 0 . 001 0 200 400 600 800 1000 Advertising expenditures (millions of $) 1200 1400 marginal effect of adverti sing lower 90% confidence limit . 015 upper 90% confidence limit 0 0 Density . 005 . 01 200 400 600 800 1000 Advertising expenditures (millions of $) 1200 1400  ® Fig. 3 Pointwise con? dence interval for the marginal effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality (upper panel) and histogram of advertising expenditures (lower panel). DGMM estimates 0. 000869 standard deviations (with a standard error of 0. 44). Note that the comparable effects for brand awareness are two orders of magnitude larger. Much of the remainder of this paper is concerned with demonstrating the robustness of this negative result. Before proceeding we note that whenever possible we focus on the more ef? cient SGMM estimator. Unfortunately, for perceived quality in many cases, including that in the fourth column of Table 5, the difference-in-Hansen J test rejects the null hypothesis that the extra moments in the SGMM estimator are valid. In these cases we focus on the DGMM estimator. 5. Objective and perceived quality An important component of a brand’s perceived quality is its objective quality. To the extent that objective quality remains constant, it is absorbed into the brand effects. But, even though the time frame of our sample is not very long, it is certainly possible that the objective quality of some brands has changed over the course of our sample. If so, then the lack of an effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality may be explained if brand managers increase advertising expenditures to compensate for decreases in objective 26 C. R. Clark et al. quality. To the extent that increased advertising expenditures and decreased objective quality cancel each other out, their net effect on perceived quality may be zero. The dif? culty with testing this alternative explanation is that we do not have data on objective quality. We therefore exclude from the analysis those categories with brands that are likely to undergo changes in objective quality (applian ces, automobiles, computers, consumer electronics, fast food, footwear, pharmaceutical OTC, telecommunications, toys, and travel).The resulting estimates are reported in Table 5 under the heading â€Å"Objective quality. † We still ? nd no effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality. 8 5. 2 Variation in perceived quality Another possible reason for the lack of an effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality is that perceived quality may not vary much over time. This is not the case in our data. Indeed, the standard deviation of the year-to-year changes in perceived quality is 0. 2154. Even for those products whose objective quality does not change over time there are important changes in perceived quality (standard deviation 0. 130). For example, consider bottled water where we expect little change in objective quality over time, both within and across brands. Nonetheless, there is considerable variation in perceived quality. The perceived quality of Aq ua? na Water ranges across years from 6. 33 to 6. 90 and that of Poland Spring Water from 5. 91 to 6. 43, so the equivalent of over two standard deviations. Across the brands of bottled water the range is from 5. 88 to 6. 90, or the equivalent of over four standard deviations. Further evidence of variation in perceived quality is provided by the automobiles category.Here we have obtained measures of objective quality from Consumer Reports that rate vehicles based on their performance, comfort, convenience, safety, and fuel economy. We can ? nd examples of brands whose objective quality does not change at least for a number of years while their perceived quality ? uctuates considerably. For example, Chevy Silverado’s objective quality does not change between 2000 and 2002, but its perceived quality increases from 6. 08 to 6. 71 over these three years. Similarly, GMC Sierra’s objective quality does not change between 2001 and 2003, but its perceived quality decreases fro m 6. 72 to 6. 26. The ? al piece of evidence that we have to offer is the variance decomposition from Section 4 (see again Table 3 and Fig. 1). Recall that the acrossbrands standard deviation of brand awareness is about six times larger than the within-brand standard deviation. In case of perceived quality the ratio is about 4. Hence, while there is more cross-sectional than time-series variation in our sample, the time-series variation is substantial for both brand aware- 8 The marginal effects are calculated at the mean, 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile for advertising for the brands in the categories judged to be stable in terms of objective quality over time.Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality 227 ness and perceived quality. Also recall from Section 4 that perceived quality with an intertemporal correlation of 0. 95 is somewhat less persistent than brand awareness with an intertemporal correlation of 0. 98. Given that we are able to detect an effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness, it seems unlikely that insuf? cient variation within brands can explain the lack of an effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality; instead, our results suggest that the variation in perceived quality is unrelated to advertising expenditures.The question then becomes what besides advertising may drive these changes in perceived quality. There are numerous possibilities, including consumer learning and word-of-mouth effects. Unfortunately, given the data available to us, we cannot further explore these possibilities. 5. 3 Brand awareness and perceived quality Another concern is that consumers may confound awareness and preference. That is, consumers may simply prefer more familiar brands over less familiar ones (see Zajonc 1968). To address this issue we proxy for consumers’ familiarity by adding brand awareness to the regression for perceived quality.The resulting estimates are reported in Table 5 under the heading â₠¬Å"Brand awareness. † While there is a signi? cant positive relationship between brand awareness and perceived quality, there is still no evidence of a signi? cant positive effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality. 5. 4 Competitive effects Advertising takes place in a competitive environment. Most of the industries being studied here are indeed oligopolies, which suggests that strategic considerations may in? uence advertising decisions.We next allow a brand’s stocks of awareness and perceived quality to be affected by the advertising of its competitors as discussed in Section 2. 9 Competitors’ advertising, in turn, can enter our estimation Eqs. 1 and 2 either relative in the share-of-voice speci? cation or absolute in the total-advertising speci? cation. We report the resulting estimates in Table 6. Somewhat surprisingly, the share-of-voice speci? cation yields an insignificant effect of own advertising. We conclude that the share-of-voice speci? cation is simply not an appropriate functional form in our application. The total-advertising speci? ation readily con? rms our main ? ndings presented above that own advertising affects brand awareness but not perceived quality. This is true even if we allow competitors’ advertising to enter quadratically in 9 For this analysis we take the subcategory rather than the category as the relevant competitive environment. Consider for instance the beer, wine, liquor category. There is no reason to expect the advertising expenditures of beer brands to affect the perceived quality or awareness of liquor brands. We drop any subcategory in any year where there is just one brand due to the lack of competitors.Table 6 Competitive effects Perceived quality 0. 845*** (0. 0217) 0. 356** (0. 145) Total advertising Brand awareness Perceived quality 228 Share of voice Brand awareness Lagged awareness/quality Relative advertising (Relative advertising)2 0. 872*** (0. 0348) 0. 236 (0. 170) ? 0. 00912 (0. 0104) 1. 068*** (0. 0406) 0. 0168 (0. 0164) ? 0. 00102 (0. 00132) Advertising Advertising2 Competitors’ advertising 0. 00892** (0. 00387) ? 0. 00000602** (0. 00000248) ? 0. 00609* (0. 00363) ?0. 0000180 (0. 000592) ? 0. 0000000303 (0. 000000535) 0. 00128** (0. 000515) Marginal effect of advertising at: Mean 5th pctl. 50th pctl. 75th pctl. 0. 00333 (0. 00239) 0. 0164 (0. 01218) 0. 00624 (0. 00448) 0. 00264 (0. 00190) Do not reject Reject* Do not reject Reject*** Do not reject 1,147 317 0. 000225 (0. 000218) 0. 00113 (0. 00110) 0. 00429 (0. 000416) 0. 000179 (0. 000173) 0. 00812** (0. 00355) 0. 00881** (0. 00382) 0. 00861** (0. 00375) 0. 00797** (0. 00349) Reject** Do not reject Do not reject Reject** Do not reject 1,147 317 ?0. 000140 (0. 000524) ? 0. 0000174 (0. 000582) ? 0. 0000164 (0. 000565) ? 0. 0000132 (0. 000510) Do not reject Do not reject Reject*** Do not reject 1,147 317 C. R. Clark et al.Advertising test: ? 1 = ? 2 = 0 Speci? cation tests: Hansen J Differ ence-in-Hansen J Arellano & Bond AR(2) Arellano & Bond AR(3) # obs # brands Do not reject Do not reject Do not reject Reject** Do not reject 1,147 317 Standard errors in parenthesis. DGMM estimates in column labeled â€Å"Total advertising/perceived quality† and SGMM estimates otherwise * p = 0. 10; ** p = 0. 05; *** p = 0. 01 Effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality 229 addition to linearly. Competitors’ advertising has a signi? cant negative effect on brand awareness and a signi? cant positive effect on perceived quality.Repeating the analysis using the sum instead of the average of competitors’ advertising yields largely similar results except that the share-of-voice speci? cation yields a signi? cant negative effect of advertising on brand awareness, thereby reinforcing our conclusion that this is not an appropriate functional form. 10 Overall, the inclusion of competitors’ advertising does not seem to in? uence our results about the role of own advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality. This justi? es our focus on the simple model without competition. Moreover, it suggests that the following alternative explanation for our main ? dings presented above is unlikely. Suppose awareness depended positively on the total amount of advertising in the brand’s subcategory or category while perceived quality depended positively on the brand’s own advertising but negatively on competitors’ advertising. Then the results from the simple model without competition could be driven by an omitted variables problem: If the brand’s own advertising is highly correlated with competitors’ advertising, then we would overstate the impact of advertising on awareness and understate the impact on perceived quality.In fact, we might ? nd no impact of advertising on perceived quality at all if the brand’s own advertising and competitors’ advertising cancel each other out. 5. 5 Category-speci? c effects Perhaps the ideal data for analyzing the effect of advertising are time series of advertising expenditures, brand awareness, and perceived quality for the brands being studied. With long enough time series we could then try to identify for each brand in isolation the effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness and perceived quality.Since such time series are unfortunately not available, we have focused so far on the aggregate effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness and perceived quality, i. e. , we have constrained the slope parameters in Eqs. 1 and 2 that determine the effect of advertising to be the same across brands. Similarly, we have constrained the carryover parameters in Eqs. 1 and 2 that determine the effect of lagged perceived quality and brand awareness respectively to be the same across brands. As a compromise between the two extremes of brands in isolation versus all brands aggregated, we ? st examine the effect of adver tising in different categories. This adds some cross-sectional variation across the brands within a 10 We caution the reader against reading too much into these results: The number and identity of the brands within a subcategory or category varies sometimes widely from year to year in the Brandweek Superbrands surveys. Thus, the sum of competitors’ advertising is an extremely volatile measure of the competitive environment. Moreover, the number of brands varies from 3 for some subcategories to 10 for others, thus making the sum of competitors’ advertising dif? ult to compare across subcategories. 230 Table 7 Category-speci? c effects Brand awareness Marginal effect Carryover rate Appliances Automobiles Beer, wine, liquor Beverages Computers Consumer electronics Cosmetics and fragrances Credit cards Fast food Food Footwear Health and beauty Household Petrol Pharmaceutical OTC Pharmaceutical prescription Telecommunications Toys Travel 0. 0233 (0. 0167) 0. 00526 (0. 0154) ? 0. 0264 (0. 0423) ? 0. 0245 (0. 0554) 0. 0193** (0. 00777) 0. 0210** (0. 0