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 …

advertising reduces the platform's attractiveness but enhances advertisers' market power. If ads are uninformative, the platform … optimally attracts only niche advertising. This is however not feasible if search costs cannot be made su ciently low, in which … unable to attract consumers with uninformative ads. The analysis is extended to allow advertising to include product …