The last decades have seen large improvements in digital advertising technology that allowed firms to better target specific consumer tastes. This research studies the relationship among digital advertising, the rise of varieties, and economic welfare. We develop a model of advertising and...

How much do consumers’ privacy valuations change under the influence of choice architecture? How does this influence affect the efficiency of data collection, by changing not only the quantity of data collected but also its representativeness? To answer these questions, we run a large-scale...

Social media provide an unparalleled platform for consumers to publicize their personal evaluations of purchased products and thus facilitate word-of-mouth communication. This paper examines relationships between consumer posting behavior and marketing variables - such as product price and...

Consumers’ purchase decisions can be influenced by others’ opinions, i.e., word-of-mouth (WOM), and/or others’ actions, i.e., observational learning. While information technologies are creating increasing opportunities for firms to facilitate/manage these two types of social interaction,...

When offered a new product whose attributes are unknown, customers can determine whether they like the product by trying it themselves or can wait to observe the experience of other customers who try the product. We specify a rational decision process and investigate the implications of learning...

The prevalence of misinformation has spurred various interested parties--regulators, the media, and competing firms--to debunk false claims in the marketplace. This paper studies whether such debunking messages provided by these parties can impact consumer purchase behavior. If so, does...

This chapter proposes an analysis of the role of advertising in the transmission of information in markets. It also describes how the economic analysis of informative advertising provides a satisfactory account of advertising practices and discusses the extent to which resorting to alternative...

Online consumer product review is an emerging market phenomenon that is playing an increasingly important role in consumers' purchase decisions. This paper examines a fundamental issue concerning online consumer review, i.e., the functions such reviews have for an online marketer. We argue that...

Labelling is an increasingly popular way to deal with the problem of non-observability of quality inherent in the consumption of credence goods. I present a model in which the number of labelled products a monopolist offers serves as a signal for the non-observable endogenous quality. An...

We conduct a field experiment on a movie-recommendation platform to identify if and how recommendations affect consumption. We use within-consumer randomization at the good level and elicit beliefs about unconsumed goods to disentangle exposure from informational effects. We find recommendations...