Sparking curiosity or tipping the scales? Targeted advertising with consumer learning
研究在消费者能自主获取信息时，垄断企业如何选择定向广告的目标群体，发现企业倾向于瞄准对产品漠不关心或无条件购买的消费者。
This paper argues, in the context of targeted advertising, that receivers’ ability to independently acquire information has a non-trivial impact on the sender’s optimal disclosure strategy. In our model, a monopolist has an opportunity to launch an advertising campaign and chooses a targeting strategy – which consumers to send its advertisement to. The consumers are uncertain about and heterogeneous in their valuations of the product, and can engage in costly learning about their true valuations. We discover that the firm generally prefers to target consumers who are either indifferent between ignoring and investigating the product, or between investigating and buying it unconditionally. If the firm is uncertain about the consumer appeal of its product, it targets these two distinct groups of consumers simultaneously but may ignore all consumers in between.