Comparative Advertising: disclosing horizontal match information

Simon Anderson and Régis Renault

No 2008-29, THEMA Working Papers from THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise

Abstract: Improved consumer information about (symmetric) products can lead to better matching but also higher prices, so consumer surplus can go up or down, while profits rise. With enough firm asymmetry though, the stronger firm's price falls with more information, so both effects benefit consumers. This is when comparative advertising is used, against a large firm by a small one. Comparative advertising, as it imparts more information, therefore helps consumers. While it also improves profitability of the small firm, overall welfare goes down because of the large loss to the attacked firm.

Keywords: comparative advertising; information; product differentiation; quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D42 L15 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-mkt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://thema.u-cergy.fr/IMG/documents/2008-29.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Comparative advertising: disclosing horizontal match information (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ema:worpap:2008-29

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in THEMA Working Papers from THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stefania Marcassa ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).