We present a model of coarse thinking, in which individuals group situations into categories, and transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not. The model explains how uninformative messages can be persuasive,...

Frequent price changes do not imply a rapid response of prices to economic shocks if the price changes are based on old information. We study the extent of such information "stickiness" for temporary sales. Institutionally, we describe how and why temporary sales are "sticky plans" that are...

This paper examines a competitive model of add-on pricing, the practice of advertising low prices for one good in hopes of selling additional products (or a higher quality product) to consumers at a high price at the point of sale. The main conclusion is that add-on pricing softens price...

We investigate the theoretical possibility and empirical regularity of two troublesome anomalies that frequently arise when cross-price elasticities are estimated for a set of brands expected to be substitutes. These anomalies are the occurrence of: (a) negatively signed cross-elasticities; and...

We study the impact of competition on information revelation in a class of Bayesian Persuasion games with multiple senders. Senders with no private information choose what information to gather and communicate to a receiver who takes a non-contractible action that affects the welfare of all...

This paper is the first to estimate the impact of exposure to deceptive advertising on consumption of the advertised product and its substitutes. We study the market for over-the-counter (OTC) weight-loss products, a market in which deceptive advertising is rampant and products are generally...

We formally model direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs and examine factors that determine a pharmaceutical firm's DTCA strategy. We highlight how the profitability of DTCA varies with the characteristics of the condition that the advertised drug treats, the incidence of...

When is it possible for one person to persuade another to change her action? We take a mechanism design approach to this question. Taking preferences and initial beliefs as given, we introduce the notion of a persuasion mechanism: a game between Sender and Receiver defined by an information...

Internet advertising has been the fastest growing advertising channel in recent years with paid search ads comprising the bulk of this revenue. We present results from a series of large scale field experiments done at eBay that were designed to measure the causal effectiveness of paid search...

Online advertising offers unprecedented opportunities for measurement. A host of new metrics, clicks being the leading example, have become widespread in advertising science. New data and experimentation platforms open the door for firms and researchers to measure true causal effects of...