Date of Graduation

Spring 5-19-2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in International and Development Economics (MSIDEC)

College/School

College of Arts and Sciences

Department/Program

Economics

First Advisor

Yaniv Stopnitzky

Second Advisor

Jesse Antilla Hughes

Abstract

What attracts people to buy condoms? HIV/AIDS remain one of the biggest health dangers of the world, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. A lot of efforts have been pursued in the past two decades to drastically reduce prevalence of HIV and increase awareness about preventive mechanisms. In order to prevent relapse of success achieved so far, it is important to recognize transformation of consumer behavior due to growth in social networks, education and awareness over time. There are a lot of behavioral triggers captured by social marketing interventions in the field of public health. In an attempt to investigate the role of marketing strategies in condom uptake we conduct a randomized control trial in Kampala, Uganda with two different promotion techniques of selling condoms – Fear versus Pleasure, to see which has a higher impact on growth of condom sales. These strategies will be randomly assigned to BRAC’s Peer Educator (PEs) hired exclusively to sell condoms by means of regular sales trainings. We wish to see whether the growth in sales is influenced by the gender of the seller. We find that pleasure marketing suggests a positive growth in sales over time. Males have a mediating role in adding value in pleasure based marketing, while the opposite trend can be seen for females. Due to having few clusters in the study, we use the method of Wild Bootstrap-6 pt Randomisation Inference to discuss the statistical significance of our results.

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