Targeted advertising with consumer search: an economic analysis of keywords advertising
Abstract
This article investigates the role of a search engine as an intermediary between firms and consumers. Search engines enable firms to target consumers who have revealed some specific needs through their query. In a framework with horizontal product differentiation, imperfect product information and in which consumers incur search costs, I show that introducing a "neutral" targeted advertising mechanism reduces social inefficiencies and tends to reduce the equilibrium price. Moreover, the accuracy of the mechanism has a non monotonic effect on the price of the good: the price is lowest when the accuracy is intermediate.Download Info
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Paper provided by HAL in its series Working Papers with number halshs-00575074.Length:
Date of creation: Nov 2009
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Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00575074
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Related research
Keywords: search-engine ; targeted advertising ; consumer search; product differentiation;References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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