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 … consumption by rendering brands a signalling device. In a price competition framework, we show that advertising increases …

competition "either or both." A central result is that platform ownership does not affect advertising levels, despite nontrivial … viewer fees. We show that the equilibrium advertising level is inefficiently high. We also demonstrate that entry of a … platform leads to an increase in the advertising level if viewers' preferences for the platforms are negatively correlated …

advertising in that medium. We apply a simple model of a product market with network externalities where firms buy advertising … advertising affects the demand for the advertised products …