Advertising Bans and the Substitutability of Online and Offline Advertising
研究结合实地实验数据，发现线上广告可替代线下广告，削弱了政府对线下酒类广告禁令的效果，尤其对新产品和低知名度产品影响更大。
The authors examine whether the growth of the Internet has reduced the effectiveness of government regulation of advertising. They combine nonexperimental variation in local regulation of offline alcohol advertising with data from field tests that randomized exposure to online advertising for 275 different online advertising campaigns to 61,580 people. The results show that people are 8% less likely to say that they will purchase an alcoholic beverage in states that have alcohol advertising bans compared with states that do not. For consumers exposed to online advertising, this gap narrows to 3%. There are similar effects for four changes in local offline alcohol advertising restrictions when advertising effectiveness is observed both before and after the change. The effect of online advertising is disproportionately high for new products and for products with low awareness in places that have bans. This suggests that online advertising could reduce the effectiveness of attempts to regulate offline advertising channels because online advertising substitutes for (rather than complements) offline advertising.