A Longitudinal Examination of the Relationship Between National-Level Per Capita Advertising Expenditure and National-Level Life Satisfaction Across 76 Countries
研究了76个国家2006-2019年数据，发现人均广告支出与国民平均生活满意度正相关，机制是广告减少市场不确定性，但在某些情境下通过物质主义路径可能转为负相关。
Advertising theory offers competing perspectives on how advertising might affect life satisfaction. For instance, advertising may have some negative effects by increasing materialism, or it may have some positive effects by reducing marketplace uncertainty. Yet research investigating these connections remains limited. We compile a data set of per capita advertising expenditure to investigate advertising’s relationship with life satisfaction within 76 countries from 2006 to 2019. We deal with several sources of endogeneity and account for other determinants of life satisfaction (e.g., gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, social support) in our analysis. Results from a within-country fixed-effect model indicate that per capita advertising expenditure is positively related to national average life satisfaction. Moderation analyses of this aggregate secondary data and two individual-level experiments provide mechanistic evidence that this occurs because of advertising’s ability to reduce marketplace uncertainty. However, supplemental analyses and an additional experiment indicate that this positive relationship is attenuated through a materialism pathway in certain situations (e.g., related to cultural, income, and subjective inequality factors) and can become negative. As such, we provide the first nuanced and multifaceted view of advertising’s complex relationship with life satisfaction in the marketing literature. History: Puneet Manchanda served as the senior editor for this article. Supplemental Material: The e-companion and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2021.0136 .