Branding and Product Differentiation in Markets with Advertising

该奖项资助实证微观经济学的研究。该项目有两个主要贡献。首先，它评估了在包装消费品市场上，民族品牌的高额溢价在多大程度上反映了消费者缺乏信息或缺乏经验。通过将消费者购买的综合数据与新颖的调查和人口统计数据结合起来，研究人员能够估计出，如果所有消费者都充分了解杂货店货架上商品的相对优点，所售商品的市场份额、价格和特征将如何变化。利用这些信息，他们能够为消费者保护、产品监管和竞争政策等重要政策问题提供信息。他们开发的新方法在本研究中研究的产品之外是有用的；研究结果将为有关消费者信息对市场竞争影响的更广泛辩论提供信息。其次，本研究为研究广告竞争对广告价格和消费者福利的影响提供了一个框架，并特别关注在线媒体市场。随着媒体，尤其是新闻媒体转向新的在线平台，一些重要的问题出现了，即广告资助的在线媒体是否会从不同的角度提供信息丰富的新闻。我们将使用网络广告市场的行业数据来研究广告商和消费者的竞争对网络新闻媒体的意识形态取向和多样性的影响，以及研究新闻之外的在线内容交付问题。我们的研究将提供一些关于在线广告竞争强度的第一批大规模证据，并将与有关在线新闻监管和融资的新兴政策辩论相关。

This award funds research in empirical microeconomics. The project makes two major contributions.First, it evaluates the extent to which the large price premium attached to national brands in consumer packaged goods markets reflects a lack of information or sophistication on the part of consumers. By bringing together comprehensive data on consumer purchases with novel survey and demographic data, the researchers are able to estimate how the market shares, prices, and characteristics of goods sold would change if all consumers were fully informed about the relative merits of the goods on the grocery store shelf. Using this information they are able to inform important policy questions in consumer protection, product regulation, and competition policy. The novel methodologies they develop are be useful beyond the products studied in this research; the results will inform broader debates about the effect of consumer information on market competition.Second, the research provides a framework for studying the effect of advertising competition on advertising prices and consumer welfare, with a special focus on online media markets. As media, and especially news media, move to new online platforms, important questions have emerged about whether advertising-funded online media will supply informative news from a diverse range of viewpoints. We will use industry data on online advertising markets to study the effect of competition for advertisers and consumers on the ideological orientation and diversity of online news media, as well as to study questions about online content delivery beyond the news. Our study will provide some of the first large-scale evidence on the strength of advertising competition online and will be relevant to emerging policy debates about the regulation and financing of online journalism.