The Informational Content of Advertising

市场营销中的大量文献致力于衡量广告中的信息内容，并粗略地确认消息包含有限的信息。然而，经济学文献并没有解决什么信息公司希望传达给潜在客户的问题。也就是说，关于信息广告的文献没有研究企业选择广告信息内容的事实。本提案的目标是发展这样一种理论，并探讨企业在决定在广告中提供的信息的数量和性质方面的动机。初步结果表明，该公司有很大的动机，从广告中隐瞒产品信息。当它确实想做广告时，它想宣传对消费者最重要的产品特性。此外，它将宣传产品的更大范围的功能，消费者自己找到这些信息的成本越高（例如，对于不经常购买的商品）。该项目的第二部分将检查这些理论预测是否在数据中得到支持。杂志和电视广告将被分析其包含的信息量和类型。然后将确定广告中的信息是否符合理论预测。该项目将进一步调查产品质量对广告内容的作用以及竞争对公司广告战略的影响。

A substantial literature in marketing is devoted to measuring the informative content in advertising, and loosely confirms that messages contain limited information. However, the economics literature has not addressed the issue of what information firms wish to convey to potential customers. That is, the literature on informative advertising has not studied the fact that firms choose the content of advertising messages. The goal of this proposal is to develop such a theory and to explore the firms' incentives regarding the amount and the nature of the information they decide to provide in ads. Preliminary results suggest that the firm has a substantial incentive to hold back product information from the ad. When it does want to advertise, it wants to advertise the product characteristics that are most important to consumers. Moreover, it will advertise a greater range of features of the product the more costly it is for consumers to find out this information for themselves (for example, for goods that are infrequently purchased). The second part of the project will check whether these theoretical predictions are upheld in the data. Magazine and television ads will be analyzed for the amount and the type of information that they contain. It will then be determined whether the information in the ads conforms to the theoretical predictions. The project will further investigate the role of product quality on advertising content and the impact of competition on firms' advertising strategy.