Many video ads are designed to go 'viral,' so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between number of views and how persuasive the ad is at convincing consumers to purchase or to adopt a favorable...

As auctions are becoming the main mechanism for selling advertisement space on the web, marketing agencies specialized in bidding in online auctions are proliferating. We analyze theoretically how bidding delegation to a common marketing agency can undermine both revenues and efficiency of the...

Online rating systems can lead, on occasion, to reviews that are unfair or un-representative of the true quality provided. On the one hand, receiving an unfairly low rating once, might induce someone a platform supplier to exert more effort and receive a better rating the next time. On the other...

Newspapers' advertising revenues have declined sharply in recent decades. We build a model to investigate the consequences on newspapers' content and prices of a reduction in advertisers' willingness to pay. Newspapers choose the size of their newsroom, and readers are heterogeneous in the...

Over the past few years, regulators have begun to consider restricting a cookie's lifetime as a way to protect consumer privacy. Most of this debate has taken place in the absence of any quantified cost-benefit analysis. To begin to fill this gap on the cost side of this discourse, we es-timate...

The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising – where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results – is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique 6 month panel dataset of...

We explore substitution patterns across advertising platforms. Using data on the advertising prices paid by lawyers for 139 Google search terms in 195 locations, we exploit a natural experiment in “ambulance-chaser” regulations across states. When lawyers cannot contact clients by mail,...

The increasing availability of individual-level data has raised the standards for measurability and accountability in digital advertising. Using a massive individual-level data set, our paper captures the effectiveness of display advertising across a wide range of consumer behaviors. Two unique...

In this paper, we build a model of the news market where advertisers allocate their ads between a social media platform and a news website that is the content creator. Our main objective is to evaluate a policy intervention that aims to foster news creation by transferring revenues from social...