This paper applies the theory of memory for advertising, developed in the consumer behavior literature, to an industrial organization setting to provide insight into advertising strategies in imperfectly competitive markets. There are two firms and infinitely many identical consumers. The firms produce a homogeneous product and distribute their brands through a common retailer. Consumers randomly arrive and are willing to buy one unit of the product. They are unaware of the existence of a particular brand unless they remember an ad describing it. Under ``retroactive interference'' consumers remember recently seen ads and forget about ads they saw in the past. Under ``proactive interference'' the ability of consumers to recall new ads is hampered by past ad exposure. The equilibrium of the advertising game is characterized for both proactive and retroactive interferences across three strategic settings. In the Simultaneous Move setting, the firms' equilibrium advertising frequencies, remarkably, do not depend on the type of interference. In the Sequential Move and Dynamic settings, proactive and retroactive interferences do give rise to different equilibrium outcomes.
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Paper provided by Department of Economics, University of Missouri in its series Working Papers with number
0510.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games D11 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Theory D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets M37 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Marketing and Advertising - - - Advertising
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