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The Advertising Mix for a Search Good

2012; Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences; Volume: 59; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1287/mnsc.1120.1575

1526-5501

Simon P. Anderson, Régis Renault,

Merger and Competition Analysis

We extend the persuasion game to bring it squarely into the economics of advertising. We model advertising as exciting consumer interest into learning more about the product, and determine a firm's equilibrium choice of advertising content over quality information, price information, and horizontal match information. Equilibrium is unique whenever advertising is necessary. The outcome is a separating equilibrium with quality unravelling. Lower-quality firms need to provide more information. For a given quality level, as a function of consumer visit costs, first quality information is disclosed, then price information and then horizontal product information are added to the advertising mix. Some suggestive evidence is provided from airline ads in newspapers. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.