Overview
Description
Professor Silk’s recent research has been focused on the economics of the advertising and marketing services industry. He has conducted econometric studies of the effects of scale and scope on the operating costs of U.S. advertising agencies (Silk and Berndt 1993) and global holding companies (Silk and Berndt 2004, 2005). He has also investigated how institutional arrangements and practices have changed over time including, policies governing conflicts in advertising agency-client relations arising from competing clients being served by a common agency (Silk and Berndt 1994, Silk 2012) and the unbundling of advertising agency services (Arzaghi et al. 2012). Finally, he done a series of longitudinal studies relating to changes in the structure and organization of the U.S. advertising and marketing services industry; specifically, the internalization of advertising services by sellers (Horsky, Michael, and Silk 2012), the geographical dispersion advertising agencies in the U.S. (King, Silk, and Ketelhohn 2003), and concentration levels and the size structure of: (a) establishments and firms in the various sectors comprising the advertising and marketing services industry, and (b) holding companies that own and operate networks of such firms (Silk and King 2013).
Professor Silk has published research on several other advertising topics including the inter-media substitutability in national advertising (Silk, Klein, and Berndt 2002), the position of the internet as an advertising medium (Silk, Klein, and Berndt 2001) and consumer and physician reaction to direct-to-consumer drug advertising (Weisman et al., 2003, 2004).
His earlier work had focused on two areas: (a) developing model and measurement systems to support decisions in the areas of new product development and marketing communications; and (b) methodological issues affecting the reliability and validity of data collection procedures widely used in research on consumer and organizational buying behavior. See Silk’s curriculum vita for a listing of publications on these topics.