We derive equilibrium incentives to use comparative advertising that pushes up own brand perception and pulls down the brand image of targeted rivals. Data on content and spending for all TV advertisements in OTC analgesics enable us to construct matrices of dollar rival targeting and estimate...

We illustrate conditions under which a trade platform selling its own products along with third-party sellers benefits or harms consumers. This benefits consumers by lowering prices in a suite of models: a gatekeeper platform facing competitive fringe of sellers, when fringe sellers can also...

We provide a canonical and tractable model of a trade platform enabling buyers and sellers to transact. The platform charges a percentage fee on third-party product sales and decides whether to be "hybrid", like Amazon, by selling its own product. It thereby controls the number of differentiated...

We derive equilibrium incentives to use comparative advertising that pushes up own brand perception and pulls down the brand image of targeted rivals. Data on content and spending for all TV advertisements in OTC analgesics enable us to construct matrices of dollar rival targeting and estimate...

We derive equilibrium incentives to use comparative advertising that pushes up own brand perception and pulls down the brand image of targeted rivals. Data on content and spending for all TV advertisements in OTC analgesics enable us to construct matrices of dollar rival targeting and estimate...

We empirically study the information-persuasion trade-off in advertising using data on the information content of advertisements, which we measure with the number of information cues in ads. We propose a simple theoretical framework to motivate an ordered probit model of information content. We...