Marketing Camp Schedule

Abstract:  Sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) are major threats to public health worldwide. Because sex workers are of particularly high risk of contracting and transmitting STIs, prevention and prompt treatment of STIs among sex workers is crucial for controlling the spread of STIs among the public at large. Towards that end, many health organizations recruit former sex workers as “peer educators” to reach out to current sex workers. The main goals of peer educator outreach (PEO) programs are to (i) teach sex workers about safe sex, (ii) reduce STIs by giving out free condoms, (iii) educate sex workers about STI symptoms, and (iv) encourage sex workers to visit community clinics frequently for screening and treatment. The effectiveness of PEO programs, however, has not been conclusively demonstrated in empirical studies so far. In particular, it is unclear which specific element(s) of PEO programs are effective.

 We develop an individual-level, integrated model to assess the effectiveness of the PEO program in the Pragati project in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. Our results suggest that while PEO does not appear to be effective in reducing the primary infection rate of STIs, it facilitates earlier detection and treatment of STIs by encouraging clinic visits and by increasing sex workers’ sensitivity to STI symptoms. Rather surprisingly, giving out free condoms appears to be counterproductive. Further, simulations based on our model suggest that increasing PEO visits by 10% (from the current level) would reduce STI prevalence (as measured by the total number of active STI person-week) by around 4.4%. In addition, it is particularly effective to focus PEO efforts on sex workers who are illiterate. 

Abstract:  Does explicit recall help or hurt memory-based comparisons? It is often assumed that attempting to recall information from memory should facilitate—or at least not disrupt—memory-based comparisons. Using the domain of price comparisons, the authors demonstrate that memory-based price comparisons are less accurate when consumers first attempt to recall the past price versus when they do not try to do so. Attempting—and failing at—explicit price recall focuses attention on metacognitive experience, resulting in a feeling-of-not-knowing, which then blocks the implicit memory that people could otherwise use to make accurate price comparisons. Drawing attention to the metacognitive feeling increases the blocking effect of recall on implicit memory, whereas drawing attention away from the feeling reduces the blocking effect. The results identify a new type of memory blocking—metacognitive memory blocking—in which the feeling-of-not-knowing blocks implicit memory during judgments. They also provide further evidence of dual representations of price memory and demonstrate that most memory-based price comparisons are based on implicit memory and do not entail explicit recall of the reference price.