Journal of Public Policy & Marketing

Politicians, think tanks, and advocacy groups have proposed paths to reduce prices and improve outcomes in the U.S. health care market. These paths tend to follow a combination of formal neoclassical economic theory and lay theory that posits solutions focused on increasing competition, reducing regulations, and normative beliefs about price→quality and price→cost relationships. The authors identify these formal and informal theories and test five tenets of health care reform. The results, based on over seven million consumer–hospital interactions across the United States, when combined with other empirical work, suggest that increased competition among hospitals is associated with lower hospital procedure prices; however, increased competition among insurers is associated with higher prices. Policy makers should not, in the current environment, rely on the tenet that reducing regulations will reduce hospital prices, nor should they assume that health care quality and price are positively correlated. The authors discuss the complexity of the health care market and identify possible reasons why the market does not always operate as predicted. Finally, the authors offer policy implications and research directions.

The relevance of marketing for public policy has been questioned because its focus on dyadic exchanges does not consider the dynamism and complexity of public problems. Public service-dominant logic, as a new lens for public policy and management, does not address this limitation, because its focus remains on delivering services to the end user. Integrating recent developments in service-dominant logic and related research, this article proposes applying a service ecosystems lens to public policy. Five propositions guide the application of this lens to public policy analysis and design. Public policy is conceptualized as a means to enable service by coordinating multiple actors’ value cocreation activities to address public problems. Inherent in this conceptualization is the multilevel nature of policy analysis, which includes the users’ value creation process (micro level), the context (meso level), and the broader value constellation (macro level). Policy design, in turn, includes the identification and support of emergent solutions driven by different actors. Policy makers therefore need to consider problem–conditions–solution combinations across the value constellation and the effect of public interventions on these constellations. The article concludes by presenting policy makers with marketing and design practices that can assist in the analysis of service ecosystems and engage relevant stakeholders in change initiatives.

This introductory article is a biennial exercise to reflect on the stream of subsistence marketplaces as a prelude to the special section on this topic following the Sixth Subsistence Marketplaces Conference in 2016. The call for papers was not restricted to conference presentations. At the end of the review process, the special section contained four articles spanning a diverse set of topics. The authors provide an overview of the subsistence marketplaces stream and a background of the conference series. This is followed by a brief introduction to the special issue. They then discuss the what, how, and why for past and future work on subsistence marketplaces.

The subsistence marketplaces literature has generated many insights on how the marketplaces of the poor function. One important issue that has remained understudied is how microentrepreneurs who start their career in poverty manage to break the status quo of subsistence marketplaces and obtain a stable position in the middle classes of developing and emerging countries. This article therefore investigates the business trajectories of entrepreneurs who have entered middle-class markets. The study shows that business development from lower-income to middle-class consumer markets is a stepwise process. Microentrepreneurs begin by serving relatives and acquaintances from their homes, then serve customers that they meet out on the street, and then upgrade their value propositions to target middle-class customers. Some of them further increase their businesses by entering business markets. From a strategic marketing perspective, the authors analyze the changes in resources and stakeholders that underlie the upgrades of the value propositions. The results provide implications for policy makers to create new jobs, generate tax revenues by formalizing businesses, and foster social mobility in emerging markets.

So-called pro-poor innovations may improve consumer well-being in subsistence marketplaces. However, little research has integrated subsistence marketplaces with the vast literature on innovation adoption. Using a questionnaire in which respondents were asked to evaluate a mobile banking innovation, this research fills this gap by providing empirical evidence of the applicability of existing innovation adoption models in subsistence marketplaces. The study was conducted in Bangladesh among a geographically dispersed sample. The data collected allowed for an empirical comparison of models in a subsistence context. The research reveals the most useful models in this context to be the value-based adoption model and the consumer acceptance of technology model. In light of these findings and further examination of the model comparison results, the research also shows that consumers in subsistence marketplaces are not motivated only by functionality and economic needs. If organizations cannot enhance the hedonic attributes of a pro-poor innovation and reduce the internal/external constraints related to adoption of that innovation, then consumers’ adoption intention will be lower.

Mobile phone proliferation in developing economies has arguably affected the everyday lives of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs like no other technology in recent times. This impact is evidenced by mobile phones’ embeddedness in everyday consumption and business practices. Surprisingly, mobile phones have only minimally been incorporated into bottom-up research approaches in subsistence marketplaces and/or ethnographic transformative research methodologies and methods. To begin addressing this important gap, the authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on mobile phones and ethnography and then gained practical experience with a new bottom-up methodology called mobile phone visual ethnography (MpVE). Using research experiences as data, the authors share micro-level details about African microentrepreneurial everyday life and highlight important methodological issues associated with conducting MpVE in subsistence marketplaces. They find that MpVE affords methodological naturalism, unpacks informant perspectives of everyday life, captures human mobility within marketplaces, and begins to democratize the research process. In doing so, this article offers a new way of giving voice to subsistence marketplace populations through more active and visible participation in research.

This article adds a new dimension of mobility among subsistence consumers to investigate their well-being during the process of rural–urban migration. Using social production function theory as the theoretic perspective as well as a mixed method, the authors identify three essential drivers that influence the life satisfaction of subsistence migrant consumers: financial resources, social connection, and sense of control (the last of which also mediates the relationship between social connection and well-being). Findings show that family closeness and social comparison orientation moderate the main effects of financial and social resources on life satisfaction. Family closeness enhances the positive effect of financial resources, while social comparison weakens the positive effect of social connection. This research contributes to the literature on subsistence consumers by introducing social production function theory into the subsistence marketplace and adopting a mixed approach to uncover the complexity of the perception of life satisfaction among subsistence migrant consumers.

Native advertising is a new form of online advertising that appears in many settings, such as blogs, social media, and entertainment and news publications. Native ads typically blend with their surrounding context, stem from sources or placements that do not signal advertising, lack overtly persuasive or sales-focused messaging, and have less clear material outcomes. Such characteristics raise ethical concerns because native ads are more difficult for consumers to identify and because they challenge concepts that are central to current deceptive advertising policy. Native advertising is a Federal Trade Commission enforcement priority, and the agency has developed guidelines for this new ad form. However, the unique characteristics of native advertising likely require novel approaches to protect consumers. In this article, the authors trace the evolution of regulation relevant to native advertising. They identify shortcomings and propose remedies that the Federal Trade Commission or industry could adopt to prevent consumer harm, detect infractions, and enforce its regulations. The authors also develop an agenda for future research needed to more fully inform public policy and industry response in this arena.