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 …

We study the interaction of customer capital and productivity through brand reallocation across firms. We develop a … study the matching process between transferable brand capital and core productivity, which can be inefficient with … significant welfare implications. We link USPTO trademark data with Nielsen sales data to study the prevalence of brand …