The personal video recorder (PVR) facilitates the use of targeted advertising by allowing companies to monitor television viewing behavior and to build demographic profiles of viewers from the data that are collected. Our research explores the extent to which an advertiser should allocate...

We show that when a single media content distributor (such as a television cable company or an Internet provider) delivers advertising messages on behalf of multiple competing brands, it can sometimes utilize customized advertising to implement monopoly pricing. Even though such monopolistic...