IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/16231.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Attention Oligopoly

Author

Listed:
  • Valletti, Tommaso
  • Prat, Andrea

Abstract

We model digital platforms as attention brokers that have proprietary information about their users' product preference and sell targeted ad space to retail product industries. Retail producers - incumbents or entrants - compete for access to this attention bottleneck. We discuss when increased concentration among attention brokers results in a tightening of the attention bottleneck, leading to higher ad prices, fewer ads being sold to entrants, and lower consumer welfare in the product industries. The welfare effect is characterized in terms of patterns of individual usage across platforms. A merger assessment that relies on aggregate platform usage alone can be highly biased.

Suggested Citation

  • Valletti, Tommaso & Prat, Andrea, 2021. "Attention Oligopoly," CEPR Discussion Papers 16231, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16231
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP16231
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Raúl Bajo-Buenestado & Markus Kinateder & Raul Bajo-Buenestado, 2023. "Prices and Mergers in a General Model of Multi-Sided Markets," CESifo Working Paper Series 10818, CESifo.
    2. GAUTIER Axel, & LAMESCH Joe,, 2020. "Mergers in the digital economy," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2020001, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    3. Carlo Reggiani & Alejandro Saporiti & Lois Simanjuntak, 2018. "Social Information and Consumer Heterogeneity," Economics Discussion Paper Series 1813, Economics, The University of Manchester.
    4. Argentesi, Elena & Buccirossi, Paolo & Calvano, Emilio & Duso, Tomaso & Marrazzo, Alessia & Nava, Salvatore, 2021. "Merger Policy in Digital Markets: An Ex Post Assessment," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 17(1), pages 95-140.
    5. Anderson, Simon & Baik, Alicia & Larson, Nathan, 2019. "Price Discrimination in the Information Age: Prices, Poaching, and Privacy with Personalized Targeted Discounts," CEPR Discussion Papers 13793, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Yiquan Gu & Leonardo Madio & Carlo Reggiani, 2022. "Data brokers co-opetition [The impact of big data on firm performance: an empirical investigation]," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 74(3), pages 820-839.
    7. Jean-Marc Zogheib & Marc Bourreau, 2021. "Privacy, Competition, and Multi-Homing," EconomiX Working Papers 2021-15, University of Paris Nanterre, EconomiX.
    8. Martin Peitz & Anton Sobolev & Paul Wegener, 2023. "Ad Blocking, Whitelisting, and Advertiser Competition," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2023_448, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    9. Motta, Massimo & Peitz, Martin, 2021. "Big tech mergers," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    10. Emmanuel LORENZON, 2020. "Uninformed Bidding in Sequential Auctions," Bordeaux Economics Working Papers 2020-20, Bordeaux School of Economics (BSE).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Digital platforms; Mergers; Targeted advertising;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance
    • L81 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Retail and Wholesale Trade; e-Commerce
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
    • M37 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Marketing and Advertising - - - Advertising

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16231. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.