The Advertising Mix for a Search Good

Authors:
Simon P. Anderson;Régis Renault
Affiliations:
Department of Economics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904;THEMA, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, 95011 Cergy Cedex, France
Venue:
Management Science
Year:
2013

Citing 11
Cited 1

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Abstract

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.