This paper shows how a firm can use non-targeted advertising to exploit consumers' desire for social status. A … monopolist sells multiple varieties of a good to consumers who each care about what others believe about his wealth. Advertising …

. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. We arrive at the following … results. First, there is no monotone relationship between prices and the degree of advertising. Second, advertising and search … are “substitutes” for a large range of parameters. Third, when the cost of either search or advertising vanishes, the …

We model the idea that when consumers search for products, they first visit the firm whose advertising is more salient …. The gains a firm derives from being visited early increase in search costs, so equilibrium advertising increases as search … heterogeneity in advertising costs. …