| dc.description.abstract | There is a rich tradition in the marketing literature that develops models to help executives quantify the financial return on marketing-mix investment. My dissertation adds novel insights to this literature by examining the social return of marketing investment in economically large and societally important sectors that are under-researched in marketing: Education and Healthcare. Essay 1 provides a comprehensive examination of benefits and costs of school district internet access spending (SDIAS). Compiling a dataset on SDIAS, school performance, and household internet access, I find that while a $1-million increase in SDIAS is associated with an improvement of academic performance indicators by .2 to 3 percentage points (amounting to $1.2 million to $2.5 million for a school district), it is also associated with a 7% increase in Part II offense-related disciplinary problems (amounting to a $38,700 to $80,160 annual cost for a school district). I also find that the benefits and costs of SDIAS are more pronounced in schools in regions with a higher level of household internet access, highlighting the need for school districts to tailor their supplementary initiatives by the level of pre-existing internet exposure in the neighborhoods. Essay 2 examines the causal effect of outreach interventions on cancer screening completion, uncovers patient-level treatment effect heterogeneity, and assesses the return on these outreach interventions. Using a unique multi-period randomized field experiment among 1,800 at-risk patients for liver cancer, I find that: 1) compared to the usual-care condition, outreach alone (outreach with patient navigation) increases screening completion rates by 10-20 (13-24) percentage points, and 2) patient-level treatment effects vary substantially across periods and by patients’ demographics, health status, visit history, health system accessibility, and neighborhood socioeconomic status, thereby facilitating the implementation of the targeted outreach program. The simulation shows that the targeted outreach program improves the return on the randomized outreach program by 74%-96% (or $1.6 million to $2 million). | en |
