We study the informational effectiveness of electoral campaigns. Voters may not think about all political issues and have incomplete information with regard to political positions of candidates. Nevertheless, we show that if candidates are allowed to microtarget voters with messages then...

Peer-To-Peer advertising is the newest trend in the age of online advertising. The Facebook gift phenomenon or invention of Application directories in Orkut or rapidly increasing usage of Avatars in Second-Life, all lead to new market dynamics using the latest advertising mode. In this paper we...

Firms design quality-price pairs to satisfy heterogeneous consumers. Apart from the core product attributes consumers gain utility through other marketing mix variables such as advertising that is affective and evokes positive feelings. An interesting question is whether a firm should use such...

Advances in data collection and algorithms help advertisers to better target individual consumers by predicting each consumer's preferences. We first show that when consumers have uncertainties about their preferences, an ad targeted to a consumer carries an implicit message: the algorithm...

Sellers often make explicit or implicit product claims without providing evidence. We show that such "puffery" of product attributes through pure cheap talk can be credible and help buyers make a better decision. Puffing one attribute of a product leads buyers to positively update their...

Pay-for-performance (P4P) pricing schemes such as pay-per-click and pay-per-action have grown in popularity in Internet advertising. Meanwhile, the traditional pay-per-impression (PPI) scheme persists, and several advertising publishers have started to offer a hybrid mix of PPI and P4P schemes....

This paper studies the general information disclosure model (Grossman, 1981; Milgrom, 1981) relaxing the assumption of monotonicity in preferences. I apply the belief-based approach, which is developed in Bayesian persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow, 2011) and applied to cheap talk (Lipnowski and...

From marketing and advertising to political campaigning and court proceedings, contending parties expend resources to persuade an audience of the correctness of their view. We examine how the probability of persuading the audience depends on the resources expended by the parties, so that...

Media content is an important privately supplied public good. While it has been shown that contributions to a public good crowd out other contributions in many cases, the issue has not been thoroughly studied for media markets yet. We show that in a standard model of commercial media bias,...

The mere fact that consumers are targeted by advertisements can affect their inference about the expected utility of a product. We build a micro-model where multiple firms compete through targeted advertising. Consumers make inferences from targeted advertising about their potential match values...