This paper studies the role of advertising and prices as signals of quality in a purely static setting, where repeat purchases are suppressed altogether, but where advertising affects demand directly. We first show, under standard regularity assumptions, that the high-quality firm will distort its price upwards and its level of advertising downwards compared to the complete-information case. We then show, under relatively mild additional conditions, that the high-quality firm will choose a level of advertising below that of the low-quality firm, even if the high-quality firm advertises most under complete information. Hence, empirically, a high price and a modest advertising budget may well signal high quality.
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Paper provided by University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Industrial Economics in its series CIE Discussion Papers with number
2005-02.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality M37 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Marketing and Advertising - - - Advertising
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References listed on IDEAS Please 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.:
Ram Orzach & Per Baltzer Overgaard & Yair Tauman, 2001.
"Modest Advertising Signals Strength,"
CIE Discussion Papers
2001-02, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Industrial Economics.
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