Don’t Take It Personally: The Effect of Explicit Targeting in Advertising Personalization

Firms increasingly use consumers’ information to personalize their communication. Personalized advertisements, targeted based on users’ past behavior, offer users relevant product information that fits their preferences. In this study, we investigate the implications of explicit targeting, making the underlying targeting mechanism explicit to consumers, and ad message framing, in terms of utilitarian or hedonic product benefits. In a large-scale field experiment in which we run a campaign for a mobile application, we show that explicit targeting reduces advertising effectiveness pointing towards increased consumer privacy concerns. While utilitarian ad messages reinforce the negative effect of explicit targeting, the use of hedonic ad messages alleviates such a negative effect. Our study contributes to IS literature on advertising personalization and the personalization privacy paradox. We provide practical insights for firms that can be used in the design and implementation of personalized advertising campaigns

Correction to: Two years later: Is the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic still having an impact on emergency surgery? An international cross-sectional survey among WSES members

Background: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is still ongoing and a major challenge for health care services worldwide. In the first WSES COVID-19 emergency surgery survey, a strong negative impact on emergency surgery (ES) had been described already early in the pandemic situation. However, the knowledge is limited about current effects of the pandemic on patient flow through emergency rooms, daily routine and decision making in ES as well as their changes over time during the last two pandemic years. This second WSES COVID-19 emergency surgery survey investigates the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on ES during the course of the pandemic. Methods: A web survey had been distributed to medical specialists in ES during a four-week period from January 2022, investigating the impact of the pandemic on patients and septic diseases both requiring ES, structural problems due to the pandemic and time-to-intervention in ES routine. Results: 367 collaborators from 59 countries responded to the survey. The majority indicated that the pandemic still significantly impacts on treatment and outcome of surgical emergency patients (83.1% and 78.5%, respectively). As reasons, the collaborators reported decreased case load in ES (44.7%), but patients presenting with more prolonged and severe diseases, especially concerning perforated appendicitis (62.1%) and diverticulitis (57.5%). Otherwise, approximately 50% of the participants still observe a delay in time-to-intervention in ES compared with the situation before the pandemic. Relevant causes leading to enlarged time-to-intervention in ES during the pandemic are persistent problems with in-hospital logistics, lacks in medical staff as well as operating room and intensive care capacities during the pandemic. This leads not only to the need for triage or transferring of ES patients to other hospitals, reported by 64.0% and 48.8% of the collaborators, respectively, but also to paradigm shifts in treatment modalities to non-operative approaches reported by 67.3% of the participants, especially in uncomplicated appendicitis, cholecystitis and multiple-recurrent diverticulitis. Conclusions: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic still significantly impacts on care and outcome of patients in ES. Well-known problems with in-hospital logistics are not sufficiently resolved by now; however, medical staff shortages and reduced capacities have been dramatically aggravated over last two pandemic years

Variations On A Rating Scale: The Effect On Extreme Response Tendency In Product Ratings

Product ratings have become an integral element of online businesses especially for experience goods, yet seem to be prone to biases that shift most of the distribution towards the extreme points of the scales. Response biases due to inherent traits (such as acquiescence or extreme response style) are widely investigated in survey design and marketing research, yet little is known about how the rating scale variations in user generated product evaluations influence their formation. More precisely, in an experimental study in the context of movie ratings, I show that the use of emotional labels attracts us-ers to the endpoints of the rating scale but their responses are less susceptible to extreme response tendency when the size of the rating scale is increased. Also, simply priming the midpoint of the scale reduces extreme responses, though this effect is attenuated when emotional labels are used. Such ef-fects remain consistent when I account for response styles, cultural dimensions and individual charac-teristics. The broad use of product ratings in generating personalized recommendations and predict-ing market performance necessitates a discussion on how to better account for potential distortions in these ratings due to variations in the rating scale