An Analysis of Optimal Advertising Under Uncertainty
分析企业在不确定性下的最优广告行为，静态模型显示风险态度导致广告决策偏离确定性情形；动态模型中，企业通过实验获取未知参数信息，最优广告水平取决于响应函数形式，并用香烟品牌数据验证二次响应函数假设。
We examine the firm's optimal advertising behavior under conditions of uncertainty. For the static one-period model, we show that the firm's attitude toward risk may be responsible for the potential divergence between advertising decisions under uncertainty and those under deterministic conditions. For the dynamic multi-period model, the ultimate impact of uncertainty on advertising is further complicated when the sales response function contains an unknown parameter, and the firm wishes to gain more information about it through experimentation. We demonstrate that whether it is optimal for the firm to experiment at an advertising rate higher, equal to, or lower than the myopic (one-period) level would depend on the specification of the response function. Finally, we offer some empirical evidence for our assumption of a quadratic sales response function, using time-series data of twelve major brands of cigarettes.