false advertising by a firm in duopolistic competition where consumers can be distinguished according to whether or not they … form rational beliefs about the trustworthiness of advertising claims. We compare private and public law enforcement in the … form of the demand for injunctions against false advertising. From a welfare perspective, we show that it can be optimal …

engage in deceptive advertising, potentially fooling a buyer into thinking the product is better than it is. Although … deceptive advertising might seem to harm the buyer, we show that he could be better off when the low-quality seller can engage … in deceptive advertising than not. We characterize the optimal deterrence rule that a regulatory agency seeking to punish …

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 …

The paper formalizes the intuition that brands are consumed for image reasons and that advertising creates a brand …'s image. The key idea is that advertising informs the public of brand names and creates the possibility of conspicuous … consumption by rendering brands a signalling device. In a price competition framework, we show that advertising increases …

There is widespread evidence that some firms use false advertising to overstate the value of their products. We … advertising actively influences rational buyers, and analyze the effects of policy under different welfare objectives. We … establish precise conditions where policy optimally permits a positive level of false advertising, and show how these conditions …

This paper argues, in the context of targeted advertising, that receivers' rational inattention and ability to … has an opportunity to launch an advertising campaign and chooses a targeting strategy -- which consumers to send its …

We estimate the distribution of television advertising elasticities and the distribution of the advertising return on … investment (ROI) for a large number of products in many categories. Our results reveal substantially smaller advertising … over-investment in advertising by most firms. While the overall ROI of the observed advertising schedule is only positive …

Using minute-by-minute TV advertising data covering some 300 firms, 327,000 ads, and $20 billion in ad spending, we … study the real-time effects of TV advertising on investors' searches for online financial information and subsequent trading … programming and national advertising at different times, allowing us to control for contemporaneous confounding events. We find …

a difficult task to craft qualifications in advertising that communicate a low level of scientific certainty. None of …

The year of 1997 witnessed an important change in direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs. For the … comprehensive risk information. This led to a three-fold growth of DTC advertising expenditure in four years, followed by an … intensive debate about the effects of DTC advertising on patient and doctor behaviors. This paper empirically examines the …