4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Advertising can make a product familiar without making it worthwhile. This tension shapes Viktor Mataja’s German encyclopedia entry, published in the 1925 Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften. Mataja treats commercial persuasion as both a practical business activity and an economic force: it helps buyers navigate unfamiliar goods, but also shapes wants, favors firms with substantial capital, and can disguise interested promotion as independent advice. His examples of publicity mediated through medical authority sharpen the question of whose judgement consumers are trusting. Neither a simple defense nor an indictment, the entry distinguishes benefits to an advertiser from benefits to society. Readers can discover why informative publicity, competitive waste, and dependence on public credibility belong to the same account of advertising.