Comparative Advertising in Markets with Network Externalities

The present paper investigates the firms' incentives to invest in comparative advertising in a spatially differentiated duopoly market characterized by network externalities. We show that for a wide range of locations, determined by the interaction between the transportation cost, the network effects and the effectiveness of advertising, firms have incentives to invest in comparative advertising with their investment levels to be positively related to the transportation cost and negatively related to the network effects. Further, comparing the equilibrium results of our model with the benchmark case without advertising activities and the case without network externalities, we show that the firms' location distance increases in the presence of network externalities, while it decreases in the presence of comparative advertising.