Alcohol, Advertising and the Theory of Exchange

This paper is a report of the results of a different approach to examining the relation between the promotion through advertising of the alcohol beverage and its consumption. The investigation applied exchange theory to modeling the relation that involved all principals of the alcohol culture. The modeling approach was formalized in a simultaneous equation representation of the behavioral relationships of the principals, that is, the consumers, advertisers, manufacturers and society. Unlike previous studies of the effect of alcohol advertisements, this approach led to the conclusion that advertising is statistically related to alcohol consumption. A database of time series values for the period 1960–1989 provided the observations for estimating the behavioral relations. The method of two-stage least squares was used for estimation purposes.