black marketing essay

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Introduction

In the fall 2019 semester, the students of the Liberal Arts and Management Program class Black Markets: Supply and Demand explored many types of black markets and examined many perspectives related to such illicit markets. Through careful discussion and reading the students discovered four prevalent themes throughout the course: the role of government in creating the context for black market activity, elements of demand, elements of supply, and varying levels of social implications.

The thirteen articles in this volume provide rich takes on these themes. We placed each article with the theme we believe it most exemplifies; however, each article conveys facts and context that relate to each theme. We believe that these themes interact and work together like strands of a rope strengthening each other.

Please note that authors of a couple of the articles personally observed others engaging in illicit activities. The authors did not. And the authors have not revealed true names of the persons they observed.

Different levels of government regulation and enforcement create the context for black market activity

The world is governed by systems of laws created to maintain order. While most individuals abide by these laws, some maneuver around the system for personal gain. Black markets thrive despite governmental regulations because rules are made to be broken.

In Jacob Herbert’s paper, titled “Weed amongst the Trees: Marijuana in Bloomington,” the theme of government is prominent.  The paper shows that, despite marijuana’s strict scheduling and many layers of enforcement, it prevails relatively commonly and openly in Bloomington due to the gap between the government’s official, legal position on the drug and the opinions of the real people who break and enforce these laws.  The people who use it clearly don’t perceive marijuana as immoral and dangerous while law enforcement has not made it a top priority, despite it being categorized as a dangerous and highly illicit drug.

Aisha Green’s series of fictionalized vignettes titled “Organized Crime” depict the different kinds of legal and illegal organ markets that are created through government intervention. In countries like the US and Iran, the government seeks to take full control of the market, but often fall short in regulating the market. However in countries with little government enforcement such as India, the same problem occurs leading to growth and expansion of the organ black market.

Emma Wagner’s essay “Illegal Logging in Peru” explores the complex relationship between the Peruvian economy and the illicit logging market, following the supply chain from the depths of the Amazon Rainforest to the reaches of the international market. Due to economic dependency, the government meets the market with a general lack of regulation and lack of enforcement. Through each stage of the Peruvian logging industry a blind eye is turned, bribes are accepted, and apathy is present.

Motivations that create demand for black market goods and services come from underlying desire, greed, or needs

Social norms and desire to satisfy wants and needs drive demand. As a result, humans seek out various goods and services, whether through illegal or legal means. The following papers demonstrate how persistent demand creates opportunities to engage in black markets.

Mary Kate Ausbrook’s essay “The Persistent Market for Fake IDs and Underage Drinking” analyzes the demand side of underage drinking. The desire to engage in supposedly fun adult like activities and fit in with others drives the demand for underage consumption of alcohol. This want goes one step further as teens actively search for ways to access alcohol by purchasing fake IDs and using them to engage in underage drinking. The strong demand fueled by these motivations allows this black market to persist.

People are motivated to fulfill their demand within black markets out of desire to obtain goods they believe will improve their quality of life, even for goods as trivial as cheese. Melanie Reinhart’s essay, “Russian ‘Fromagicide’,” explores the black market cheese trade that arose after sanctions were placed on certain food imports into Russia. Black markets exist to fulfill demand that is unfulfilled within legal markets. When governments make a good or service illegal, people will find a way to access that good, no matter the regulations surrounding it.

Maria Emmanoelides’ essay “Blood Diamonds: The Ugliness of a Natural Beauty” examines how individuals within society create demand for a product or resource. Some individuals participate in the market unknowingly by purchasing smuggled diamonds and others participate to obtain wealth and control within the government, as depicted in the film Blood Diamond. Without demand for these gems from countries like the United States, the civil war rebel groups would not receive the funding that they need to continue to smuggle these gems. The demand for these ideas help this market to prosper and flourish.

Ashley Brown’s short story, “Simple Life to Secret Life: An Amish Teen’s Journey to the Black Market” portrays a typical Amish teen going through his rebellious stage, involving the use of illegal drugs. Because this rebellious stage is encouraged in Amish culture, Amish teens feel the need to partake in illegal activity. This societal pressure creates the demand for illicit drugs that exists in rural Amish communities such as Shipshewana, Indiana.

Unique motivations for black market suppliers spur economic growth

The international black market encompasses an array of demands. With each good or service, suppliers act in response to demand with unique motivations, including economic stability, better opportunities, etc. Thus, these black market suppliers are able to support markets, growing the shadow economy where licit markets fail. In the following works, the authors describe some of these motivations and their effect on the supply side of the economy.

Cheng Chui Ping, better known as Sister Ping, was a Chinese human smuggler, or Snakehead. Casey Carroll’s story, “The Mother of All Snakeheads,” describes the events that took place in Sister Ping’s life that caused her to be one of the most successful suppliers in the market, and that led to her downfall.

Stacey Tam’s essay “Making the Old New Again” investigates the global supply chain for counterfeit fountain pens. Facing an increasing demand for pens, Chinese manufacturers maximize profit through mass production of name brand counterfeits. The counterfeit pens retail at prices lower than authentic ones, but the drastically low cost of production yields high profit margins. These high profit margins motivate counterfeiters to supply the market, as other options for economic stability are limited in rural villages in China.

In Lauren Fischer’s essay, “A Market for the Digital World,” we learn that the social media market of fake followers and bots is increasingly facilitated by entrepreneurial suppliers and technology companies.  She explains how companies like Divumi create the technology that makes this market possible, how these companies operate legally and illegally and are therefore responsible for much of this gray and black market activity. As technology evolves and advances, so does this market and the organizations that supply it.

Black markets create social implications that can have long lasting effects on society and the environment

While technological developments are advantageous for countries and the global economy, they elicit a more interconnected world. Therefore, the scope of every market, legal or not, expands with the rise of globalization. As black markets increase in size and users, they affect not only people involved in transactions but also the surrounding environments both geographically and socially. Moreover, their diverse scopes result in a myriad of effects on various environmental and societal structures. The following papers address the wide perspectives, influences, and implications that black markets can offer.

Elliott Obermaier focuses on Napster’s history of innovation. His essay, “Napster: the Black Market that Publicly Dominated the Music Industry,” describes how the company set the standard for technological advancement in music streaming that is currently thriving. However, the market created a dilemma regarding how artists, streaming services, and record labels should divide the profits of this newfound means of listening to music. The outcome of the industry’s lawsuit against Napster affected all Napster’s users and those who were losing royalties.  It also opened the door for the long lasting legal, social, and economic change.

Exotic animals have been bought and sold since ancient times. Yulia Nefedova’s essay,  “Illicit Market for Animals,” analyzes the inner-workings and implications of the modern marketplace for exotic wildlife and animal body parts. With technological development, people’s desires for exotic animals has increased.  While governments and wildlife organizations try to protect animals from poaching, the black market continues to grow, negatively impacting wildlife diversity and the world’s environment.

Peter Andrews investigates the trade for human organs in “The Value of a Life.” Human organs are arguably the most valuable commodity traded in today’s society due to their exclusivity and unparalleled ability to save lives. With the significant increase in the demand for new organs in recent decades, legal organizations like UNOS are unable to assist the majority of organ donor patients. Out of desperation, many turn to the illicit industry to accommodate them. This demand among affluent individuals coupled with general apathy towards the impoverished community gave rise to the organ trafficking black market. The implications of this market are the negative physical, societal, and fiscal impacts that it has on the illicit organ donor population.

Perspectives on Black Markets v.3 Copyright © by Michael Morrone et. al. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What Is the Black Market?

Why black markets exist, what can you buy on the black market, the case for black markets, the case against black markets, the bottom line.

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• Financial Crime & Fraud

How Black Markets Work

Amy Fontinelle has more than 15 years of experience covering personal finance, corporate finance and investing.

A black market is a transaction platform, whether physical or virtual, where goods or services are exchanged illegally. What makes the market “black” can be the illegal nature of the goods and services themselves, the illegal nature of the transaction, or both.

For example, while neither buying nor selling food is illegal, the transaction enters the black market when the good sold is illegal. And while it’s perfectly legal to sell hamburgers, when an all-cash restaurant does not remit to the state government the mandatory sales taxes on its transactions, it too has entered the black market.

Black markets, also called shadow markets , come about when people want to exchange goods or services that are prohibited by governments. Black markets skew economic data , as transactions are unrecorded.

Black markets also arise when people don’t want to pay taxes on the transaction for legal or illegal goods or services. Some black markets exist simply because people don’t realize there are laws they aren’t following, such as bartering and not reporting the taxable value of the transaction, or hiring a regular housekeeper or babysitter but failing to pay employment taxes.

Licensure-Driven Black Market Conditions

The licensing restrictions that governments impose on numerous occupations cause some workers to enter the black market because they don’t want or can’t afford to invest the time and money to obtain the required licenses.

For example, in New York City, one must purchase a license called a medallion in order to legally operate a taxi business. These medallions cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, making them prohibitively expensive for most entrepreneurs . As a result, some people may choose to operate black-market taxis without a license—at least, until they are caught. Ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft have further splintered the market for these types of businesses.

Trade-Driven Black Market Conditions

Sometimes participants in black markets don’t want to act illegally, but because they lack the ability to work legally and need to make money, they don’t report their jobs or income to the government. Such situations arise when illegal immigrants obtain jobs, when students traveling abroad obtain employment without acquiring a work visa , or when children work in violation of minimum age requirements.

Regulations-Driven Black Market Conditions

Black markets can also appear when government-imposed price ceilings create shortages . For example, if the government caps the price at which a grocery store may sell bottled water after a natural disaster, the store will quickly run out of water. Vendors will then likely appear selling water at the higher prices people are actually willing to pay. This secondary market is a black market.

Governments can also cause black markets through overregulation. An extreme example can be found in Cuba, where the rationing and ineffective central planning of communism made it difficult to purchase the desired quantities of even basic products such as cooking oil. Black markets are rampant because citizens want to buy things that are difficult to come by through legal channels. They’re also common because it’s so hard to find a job.

Economy-Driven Black Market Conditions

High unemployment can give rise to black markets. When workers can’t find jobs in the above-ground economy, they may turn to jobs in the underground economy . These jobs could be as innocuous as fixing a neighbor’s toilet (but being paid in cash and not reporting the income to the tax authorities) or as serious as selling cocaine (where not only the sale of the product itself but also the non-reporting of taxable income  is illegal).

Consumers can buy and sell numerous types of goods and services on the black market. Anything that is subject to the conditions described in the previous sections can show up in the underground economy. In the United States, we tend to think of illegal drugs, prostitution, designer knockoffs, and ticket scalping when we think of black markets.

More serious and lesser-known black markets operating worldwide include those in human organs, endangered species, babies, weapons, and slave labor (human trafficking).

Black markets also exist where people might never expect to find them. Online, it’s possible to buy an eBay account (to falsely obtain a favorable seller rating) and to buy Instagram followers (to inflate one’s perceived popularity).

Some people are in favor of black markets. These markets can supply goods that, while illegal (such as marijuana), arguably improve quality of life (for example, when used to alleviate pain for patients who haven’t found relief from legal pharmaceuticals).

Black markets can provide legal necessities that are in short supply, as in the case of everyday Cuba or a city hit by a hurricane. Also, the shadow economy makes it possible for people to earn a living who would otherwise be destitute or seek welfare—people who would be perfectly employable under less government regulation or in an economy with a higher employment rate.

Overall, the case for black markets is highly subjective and depends on one’s moral and ethical beliefs. If you think that drug use is a victimless crime, you might not have a problem with the black market for illegal drugs. If you think tax rates are too high, you might be happy to hire workers under the table.

Black markets have a number of downsides, some of which are subjective, but many of which almost everyone would agree are serious problems.

Some black market goods are stolen from legitimate markets, taking business away from law-abiding entrepreneurs. While some consumers might not mind buying a stolen designer handbag at a discount because they think the retailer’s price is too high, others would be appalled if they knew that while they thought they were simply getting a bargain, they were really supporting an organized crime ring. There is often a dark side to organized crime that goes beyond theft and the resale of stolen goods. This and other black-market activities are sometimes used to fund terrorism since the profits can’t easily be traced.

Violence is another problem inherent in black markets. Because these markets are unregulated, participants can’t rely on legitimate police protection in the event of theft or other crimes. If a drug dealer’s stash of cocaine is stolen by a rival dealer, he can’t ask the police to help him get his merchandise back. The dealer might send one of his employees to shoot the thief and reclaim the stolen goods, further  compounding the effects of the original crime.

Another argument against black markets is that because their participants don’t pay taxes, a heavier tax burden falls on law-abiding citizens.

Black markets will continue to exist as long as we have regulations and taxes. Laws that prevent people from buying and selling the goods and services they desire and taxes that prevent people from keeping what they feel is their fair share of earned income will always cause people to hide their activities from law enforcement agencies, tax authorities, and other regulators.

City of New York. “ Medallion Taxicab Service ,” Page 10.

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Does Legalization Reduce Black Market Activity? Evidence from a Global Ivory Experiment and Elephant Poaching Data

Black markets are estimated to represent a fifth of global economic activity, but their response to policy is poorly understood because participants systematically hide their actions. It is widely hypothesized that relaxing trade bans in illegal goods allows legal supplies to competitively displace illegal supplies, but a richer economic theory provides more ambiguous predictions. Here we evaluate the first major global legalization experiment in an internationally banned market, where a monitoring system established before the experiment enables us to observe the behavior of illegal suppliers before and after. International trade of ivory was banned in 1989, with global elephant poaching data collected by field researchers since 2003. A one-time legal sale of ivory stocks to China and Japan in 2008 was designed as an experiment, but its global impact has not been evaluated. We find that international announcement of the legal ivory sale corresponds with an abrupt ~66% increase in illegal ivory production across two continents, and a possible ten-fold increase in its trend. An estimated ~71% increase in ivory smuggling out of Africa corroborates this finding, while corresponding patterns are absent from natural elephant mortality, Chinese purchases of other precious materials, poaching of other species, and alternative explanatory variables. These data suggest the widely documented recent increase in elephant poaching likely originated with the legal sale. More generally, these results suggest that changes to producer costs and/or consumer demand induced by legal sales can have larger effects than displacement of illegal production in some global black markets, implying that partial legalization of banned goods does not necessarily reduce black market activity.

We thank Scott Barrett, Julian Blanc, Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, Christopher Costello, Jeremy Darrington, Andy Dobson, Ray Fisman, Martin Heijdra, Kelsey Jack, Amir Jina, Steven Levitt, Molly Lipscomb, Tom Milliken, Dinsha Mistree, Katarzyna Nowak, Michael Oppenheimer, Andrew Plantinga, Steven Raphael, Mary Rice, Shruti Suresh, Reed Walker, David Wilcove, Tom Vogl, and seminar participants at Columbia University, UC Berkeley, the UC Santa Barbara Occasional Conference, the NBER EEE meeting, and the Triangle Resources and Environmental Economics Seminar, for important comments and suggestions. N.S. was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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• June 8, 2016

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• Did a Legal Ivory Sale Increase Smuggling and Poaching? Author(s): Solomon M. Hsiang Nitin Sekar After the experimental 2008 sale, there was a discontinuous jump in the proportion of wild elephants poached and in seizures of...

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• What is the black market?
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A black market is when people buy and sell things without informing their government or following their government’s rules . The terms ‘shadow economy’ and ‘underground economy’ mean the same thing: all three phrases are used interchangeably.

People buy from the black market because the good or service they want is difficult or impossible to get hold of legally (because, say, it’s banned in their country) or because they want to save some money (by, say, not paying any tax on it).

If you do some cash-in-hand work and don’t declare it on your tax form, you’re participating in the underground economy. Same if you buy cocaine or cannabis in the UK, whether in-person from a dealer or online from the dark web (an anonymous part of the internet where dodgy stuff often happens).

But you're not taking part in the black market if you sell your old laptop to a mate or buy a second-hand toaster at a car boot sale, even if you don’t tell the government about it. That's because the UK government only requires you to declare and pay tax on the (legal) stuff you sell if it totals more than £12,000 a year .

Because black market transactions fly under the official radar, they can make make it difficult for economists to figure out what a place’s economy really looks like. They’re often not included in GDP , which is the sum of all the goods and services a country produces each year. That can make an economy seem smaller than it really is . Or what looks like a high unemployment rate could really just be lots of people working secretly in the shadow economy.  

Black markets are theoretically examples of free markets , because transactions are influenced by supply and demand without any government interference. However, their illegality can be a big barrier to entry for sellers. Selling some black market products means risking a lengthy jail sentence and/or a turf war with an established criminal network.

The end result is that some black markets end up as monopolies (dominated by one seller) or oligopolies (dominated by a few sellers). The fewer sellers - aka the less competition - there is in any market, the higher prices tend to be (since buyers have little choice about who they buy from).

Black markets are often seen as bad things. By not paying tax, they shortchange governments who then have less money to spend on public goods like education or healthcare. They are often linked to crime, and bring stuff into a country that many people consider dangerous or immoral.

But many generally law-abiding people find the underground economy helpful and even necessary, particularly if their governments are incompetent, autocratic or corrupt. For example, for the last few years in Venezuela the government has heavily restricted the amount of food, money and other necessities available in its official shops. So desperate, hungry people have turned to the black market (and paid much higher prices) in order to meet their needs.

Even in democratic countries like the UK, plenty of people are comfortable with at least some form of black market. For example, just under half ( 44 percent ) of Brits say it’s okay for small traders, such as plumbers and cleaners, to hide some of their earnings in order to reduce their tax bill, usually by working for ‘cash in hand’.

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Marketing Still Has a Colorism Problem

• Mita Mallick

Four strategies to help the industry fight discrimination against those with darker skin.

Colorism — discrimination against those with darker skin — is a product of racism. As marketers scramble to have brands connect with and serve Black and brown communities, they first have to acknowledge that colorism not only still exists, but is systemic. We must break through our own collective biases, which inform who we choose to feature and whose stories get told in marketing. The author provides four ways marketers can fight colorism and ensure they’re on the path to building more inclusive brands. Consumers are waiting to see what rebranding and new advertising campaigns will look like from brands that made promises to stop propagating colorism and perpetuating racism. Belief-driven buyers are becoming the new normal; more consumers want their brands to represent their values and be advocates for societal change. Marketers can either risk being left behind or embrace the responsibility to uphold their promises and challenge the industry standards.

“She’s too dark,” the creative director snapped at me when I recommended the image of a dark-skinned Black woman washing her face for our hero campaign shot. “We can’t use that image for this global campaign.”

• Mita Mallick is the author of Reimagine Inclusion , a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller. She is currently the head of DEI at Carta. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice, cohost of The Brown Table Talk  podcast, and her writing has been published in Fast Company, The New York Post, and Adweek.

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Medical Exploitation and Black Market Organs: Profiteering and Disparities in Global Medicine

"Global social justice." It is an excellent but overwhelming goal. We rightly care about fellow human beings who are cut off from basic goods like clean water, basic education, and healthcare. Their needs are staggering. Yet, those who are most vulnerable to exploitation are often not those who need something, but those who have something that others desperately want. These victims are the poor and disadvantaged who are the targets of organ trafficking.

The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity has focused attention on this urgent issue for the past two years, beginning with several lectures in 2008, and highlighted in our 2009 conference, Global Bioethics: Emerging Challenges Facing Human Dignity .

Black market organ transfer is the consequence of a gross imbalance between supply and demand. The waiting list of patients who are in need of an organ vastly outnumbers the organs being donated. Over the last ten years, more than 65,000 transplant candidates in the United States were removed from the waiting list because they died.[1] The desperation of sick patients and shortage of domestic donors has contributed to the emergence of "transplant tourism," connecting those who need an organ with those who have them. Most often, the prized organ is a kidney, but partial-livers and single corneas are also traded. Typically, the sick patient is from a wealthy nation, while the organ donor usually lives in a disadvantaged country. The transplant may take place in the recipient's country, the donor's country, or in a private, boutique hospital in a third location. These hospitals are set up to avoid legal barriers in the home countries of donors and recipients.

The National Organ Transplant Act makes it "unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation."[2] Excluding the buying and selling of the organ itself, this act clearly allows monetary compensation for all other aspects of the transfer including "removal, transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, and storage of a human organ or the expenses of travel, housing, and lost wages incurred by the donor."

Aside from reimbursement for medical and travel costs these guidelines allow for virtually no benefit to be procured by the donor. The lack of organ donors suggests that for most people altruism is not enough. In their search for an organ donor many have traveled abroad, often to poor countries. Wealthy people with sick organs and poor people with healthy organs tend to gravitate together in hopes of an exchange. Sadly, the exchange is often heavily one sided. Transplant procedures are a bargain for the organ recipient. One Christian physician in India told CBHD that India is the medical tourism destination of the world. In 2007, over 150,000 medical tourists advantaged themselves of the lower prices in India ($200,000 vs. $10,000 for a heart valve replacement), and the readily available market of kidney sellers.

Advocates of social justice might think that this provides a unique way for an impoverished man to care for his family. He can live adequately with one organ, and the price is a princely sum in his community. The reality is less attractive.

First, the power distance between donor and potential recipient is great. The group identified as prospective donors are vulnerable because of their low social status, their ethnicity, their gender,[3] their age, or their incarceration.[4] Even though they are called 'donors,' many part with their kidney under the enticement of the promise of a rich reward. Staggering under a load of debt, they grasp at this hope of improving their lot in life. Others are simply coerced (with brutal force), or deceived. In the hospital for one purpose, they wake up from surgery to discover their kidney has been removed without their consent.

Consider the stark picture of exploitation in India: Kidney recipients often pay $25,000 for the transplant, and the donor may receive $1,250 to $2,500. Kidneys may be sold for as little as $700, but the patient may pay over $180,000 for the transplant. Who is pocketing the difference? The payment is divided among the kidney broker, the harvesting surgeon, and the transplant hospital. Some receive nothing. One Manila transplant surgeon callously remarked that a large bag of rice should suffice, since "donors" are only playing the part of the Good Samaritan.

Even if they do receive payment, few donors improve their lot in life. Within a few months, their situation is even more dire. The payment has vanished into the pockets of those to whom the donor was in debt. The donor often is physically maimed, and unable to return to his former line of work: heavy manual labor.

However, the relatively small financial compensation should not be the basis for our complaint against organs being bought and sold on the black market. Even if the donor were to receive larger sums of money ethical difficulties would remain and the notion of global social justice would not be advanced. Human organs ought not to be assigned an arbitrary monetary value regardless of the price tag. Whether the black market donor is paid $2,000 or $20,000 he or she is being used as a means to an end rather than being respected as an individual human being.

The ethical problems do not stop there. Tragically, many are outcast within their village, where they are viewed as prostitutes. Viorel, a 27-year-old, unemployed kidney seller from Moldova believes it is worse than that: "We are worse than prostitutes because what we have sold we can never get back. We have given away our health, our strength, and our lives."[5]

One of the darkest sides of the organ trade is the physical abandonment of the donors. Once the recipient has the organ, the profiting parties tend to lose all interest in the donor. Few donors have subsequent access to medical care, and many are maimed for life. This is no way for fellow human beings to be treated, even if both parties receive temporary benefits.

Our doctor friend in India reminds us that all people are made in the image of God, from the callous transplant surgeon to the sick kidney patient to the abandoned donor. We must pursue justice and compassion. There are ethical ways for transplant patients to receive organs from global donors. The donor must be respected as an individual, must be able to give truly informed consent, must be free from physical or financial coercion, and must be cared for after his organ is harvested.

As Christians, we should demand no less.

[1] "2009 OPTN / SRTR Annual Report: Transplant Data 1999-2009" U.S. Department of Health & Human Services http://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/ar2009/ (accessed July 23, 2010).

[2] "National Organ Transplant Act" http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sup_01_42_10_6A_20_II_30_H.html (accessed July 23, 2010). The Department of Health & Human Services implemented a Final Rule establishing the regulatory framework for the structure and operations of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network in 2000, http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title42/42cfr121_main_02.tpl (accessed July 23, 2010).

[3] Even though women may be approached to give a kidney, the majority of donors are men. Virtually all organs go to men; women rarely receive illicit organ transplants.

[4] Before China adopted the Human Transplantation Act in 2007, there were reports of as many as 11,000 transplants of organs from prisoners whose execution was timed to meet donor needs. See Debra A. Budiana-Saberi and F. L. Delmonico, "Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism: A Commentary on the Global Realities." American Journal of Transplantation 8 (2008): 925-929.

[5] Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Rotten Trade: Millennial Capitalism, Human Values and Global Justice in Organs Trafficking." Journal of Human Rights , no. 2 (June 2003): 197-226, 200.

Paige C. Cunningham and Michael Shafer, "Medical Exploitation and Black Market Organs: Profiteering and Disparities in Global Medicine,” Dignitas 17, no. 1&2 (2010): 6–7.

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The black market in academic papers – and why it’s spooking publishers

Senior Lecturer in Learning Technology, Bath Spa University

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Dana Ruggiero does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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A colleague of mine recently posted a plea on an open forum asking for someone with access to please send her a copy of a journal article. This colleague works at one of the premier research institutions in the EU which has an annual budget of over €100m, yet she had to ask her connections on Facebook for access to a scholarly article. Her university did not have access to this piece of literature that she needed to complete her research.

This story isn’t unique. Many academics have to seek other means for finding articles rather than pay the minimum US$30 that most publishers charge to access an article.

Instead, a black market of scholarly papers exists that those in the know can access as easily as using a hashtag on Twitter: #ICanHazPDF. This system relies on academics helping each other. I post a request for a paper and in ten minutes a response with an attachment may come back to me. The original tweet is then deleted.

Other disciplines have set up listservs and private sites with similar goals: those in need can ask those with access and online journal articles or books are provided free of charge. “There is a cool network of psychology students who have shared stuff by request for a couple of years, its called the European Federation of Psychology Students’ Associations and we were all friends helping friends,” Aart Franken, a recent PhD graduate from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told me.

Enter Sci-Hub

For the last few years, there has been a new player in town. Sci-Hub , a website developed in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan , a researcher from Kazakhstan, is a repository for over 48m papers which continues to grow every day. Elbakyan has been called a modern-day Robin Hood by some.

The publishing company Elsevier is currently suing Sci-Hub and Elbakyan in New York for copyright infringement. After Elsevier won a temporary injunction against the site in January, it reopened with a new domain name. Alicia Wise, Elsevier’s director of universal access, said that for the company : “It’s as if somehow stealing content is justifiable if it’s seen as expensive … It’s not as if you’d walk into a grocery store and feel vindicated about stealing an organic chocolate bar as long as you left the Kit Kat bar on the shelf.”

But Sci-Hub has changed the way that many think of public access. Unlike previous systems, it keeps a copy of the requested paper on its server so that it doesn’t have to go looking for it when someone else asks. Now instead of asking a group of your peers or sending out a hopeful tweet, anyone can go to Sci-Hub and see whether the paper is there. Within 30 seconds the site loads a PDF version of the requested article that Sci-Hub has accessed from Libgen – a search engine for scientific articles and books, which allows free access to otherwise paywalled content – or skimmed from the publisher.

An affordability problem

As an academic who publishes within the traditional journal system, it’s worth looking at the normal scenario of scholarly publishing.

• An article is written and submitted to a journal.
• That article is accepted after revision and the author is asked to sign away copyright.
• The author is given the chance to publish “open access” which requires the author or the university to pay – in the case of Elsevier, between US$500 and US$5,000 . Other publishers have similar policies .
• If the author cannot afford this fee, or their university refuses to pay it, or the grant that funded the research does not allow payment for publishing, the article is published closed and only those with subscriptions can access it. (Green open access, or the ability to self-archive the accepted version of the article in an institutional repository, is free of charge either immediately or after an embargo period depending on the publisher.)

This last point about affordability is the norm. Not many academics can afford to publish open access with top-tier journals, but for their careers, they can’t afford not to publish in what are known as “high-impact” journals. As Katrin Becker, adjunct professor in computer science and game design at Mount Royal University, in Canada, told me:

Open access that requires authors to ‘buy’ the publication of their articles is wrought with problems, from silencing adjuncts and people without grants, to potentially influencing acceptance based on money rather than the quality of the research.

The difference between academic publishing and other types of creative work is in who owns the rights and who gets paid. Simply put, the author does not get money once the article is published in the journal, the academic editors and peer reviewers are not paid for reviewing these articles. The publisher gives nothing and gets everything.

Academics have the choice where to publish but once the article has been signed over we have no voice in the process – our only choice is to not choose specific publishers.

The pursuit of knowledge

The open access movement has come out of the idea that publicly-funded research should be available to the public. As my colleague Grainne Conole, former professor of education at Bath Spa, told me: “Research is about sharing and discussing our findings with peers, research shouldn’t be locked up in closed systems.”

There are thousands of open access journals but many of them are seen to lack the prestige that universities demand for researchers. We are stuck: academics can’t afford to read their own work but they can’t afford not to publish in these prestigious journals if they want to advance their careers.

Sci-Hub has provided a new path . It doesn’t fix the flawed system of academic publishing, but it does let those without traditional access read the scholarly articles they need to complete their degrees, work on their research projects, and keep up to date with their fields.

As Martin Weller, professor of educational technology at the Open University, told me:

Sci-Hub is a bit like distant thunder at a picnic for publishers. They ignored open access, then tried to discredit it, then tried to make extra money from it – but Sci-Hub may make them actually address the issue.

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Marketing Essays

Magicflavor comprehensive marketing plan, evolving brand strategies: enhancing sustainable competitive advantage and brand equity, leveraging swot analysis for strategic excellence, a comprehensive analysis of competitive strategy and market focus, factors driving value co-creation, conagra’s strategic branding transformation, evolving trends in global influencer marketing, the impact of social media on louis vuitton’s growth in the british market., research on the factors influencing the willingness to use digital currency electronic payment in china —case of e-cny, developing an innovative idea for zoony skincare company, influences on consumer behavior in the healthcare sector, analyzing organizational goals and objectives, netflix’s 2020 strategy for battling rivals in the global streaming video market, image and brand management crossroads: a case study, brand reputation and purchase decision, essays on marketing.

Maybe you’re looking for a career in it or simply are interested in the power behind marketing. Either way, it’s an excellent topic for multiple essay topics. Marketing is what business uses to gain the attention of their potential customer. They use it to entice what users are looking to get and how their products or services can fulfill those needs.

It’s a blend of subliminally speaking to a consumer and using messaging in various mediums. This includes print, images and video to get to a psychological point of view. With Digital marketing and globalization it’s only become more complex. New markets are always opening up and new ways of sending out marketing messages.

It’s quite a diverse topic that looks at everything from what advertising looks like to how to capture someone’s attention in a matter of seconds. With technology, it’s also easier to capture marketing data points, helping to shift marketing from a creative field to an innovative and data-driven area. Items such as target audience and segmentation can be easily tracked so marketers can properly drive their efforts to the right consumers who will eventually buy the product or service.

How to write an essay about marketing

There are a lot of different avenues to go with marketing. You can look at how it’s a critical component of sales in general for business or, what consumer behavior looks like and how marketing works with it. There are also different types of marketing to consider as well.

Or you can go towards the psychology of consumerism and how marketing plays a critical role, and ensure that you cite plenty of use cases and data sets related to this topic. Technology also continues to grow in this field, with numerous marketing tools to help marketers in their roles. Looking at such technology, or the future of marketing technology will make for an excellent essay topic.

Topics to consider for essays on marketing:

• The importance of marketing in the modern business world • The different types of marketing • The marketing mix • The marketing research process • Consumer behavior • The future of marketing

So, try looking through the samples on this page. They will help you see different people’s points of view on marketing and create your own masterpiece!

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"Black Market" comes from a time in the eighteenth century when southern Carolina slaves were encouraged to grow their goods to market. As they grew profitable, local government barred white people from buying their food, yet many continued to do so. As a result of an increase in government restrictions, black market prices, for the items most needed, will rise. Restrictions represent a decrease in supply and an increase in risk on the part of the suppliers, sellers, or any middlemen. A decrease in supply will increase prices, and also increased enforcement of restrictions will increase prices for the same reason...

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• CAPITAL MARKET ANALYSIS: A DICUSSION ON EFFICIENT MARKET HYPOTHESIS
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Suit Claims NY Hemp Retailers Are Collateral Damage in State Sweep of Black-Market Marijuana

The Article 78 claim asks to restrain the state government from engaging in “warrantless military style raids” with law enforcement under the “guise” of administrative inspections against licensed hemp retailers.

August 27, 2024 at 11:49 AM

6 minute read

Litigation Reporter

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A New York lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of five licensed hemp retailers says they are collateral damage in the state Office of Cannabis Management’s raids of illicit marijuana businesses.

Filed in state Supreme Court of Albany County by Mandelbaum Barrett partner Joshua S. Bauchner, who chairs his firm’s cannabis, hemp and psychedelics practice group, the Article 78 claim asks to restrain the state government from engaging in “warrantless military style raids” with law enforcement under the “guise” of administrative inspections against licensed hemp retailers.

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