Advertising supported content sampling is ubiquitous in online markets for digital information goods. Yet, little is … known about the profit impact of sampling when it serves the dual purpose of disclosing content quality and generating … advertising revenue. This paper proposes an analytical framework to study the optimal content strategy for online publishers and …

This paper studies content strategies for online publishers of digital information goods. It examines sampling … strategies and compares their performance to paid content and free content strategies. A sampling strategy, where some of the … industry. We analyze optimal decisions concerning the size of the sample and the price of the paid content when sampling serves …

Economists have long recognized that advertising has two main functions: to inform and to persuade. In the information … Google search. That makes virtually all advertising today purely persuasive in function. The courts have long recognized that … purely persuasive advertising is anticompetitive, because it induces consumers to buy products that they do not really prefer …

The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online search renders most advertising obsolete … as a tool for conveying product information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers … persuasive advertising is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers, but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was unable to pursue …