Thread by @SeilerStephan

As a little Christmas present 🎁 I put together a list of my top quant marketing articles (broadly defined) of 2021.

Advertising, Pricing, COVID-19 😬 and other interesting stuff!

#MarketingTwitter #EconTwitter

Papers are listed below in no particular order ...

1) Advertising Spending and Media Bias: Evidence from News Coverage of Car Safety Recalls (Mgmt Sc) by Graham Beattie, @RDurante_2020, @briangknight, @Ananya_Sen_.

Super interesting study on how media bias & ad incentives interact.

Newspapers are less likely to cover safety recalls from brands that regularly advertise. Lots of interesting analysis that delves into the two-sided nature of the market and thinks carefully about incentives created by reader preferences and by advertisers.

2) Informational and Noninformational Advertising Content (Mktg Sc) by @ytsai & Elisabeth Honka

Paper uses border identification strategy from @btshapir's work, but goes beyond ad effect on purchases and decomposes impact along the conversion funnel.

The paper finds that advertising mostly affects brand recall, but not choice conditional on awareness (which is in line with Honka, Hortascu, Vitorino, RAND 2017).

3) The Competitive Effects of Entry: Evidence from Supercenter Expansion (AEJ: Applied) by Peter Arcidiacono, Paul B. Ellickson, Carl F. Mela, John D. Singleton.

The paper provides a very strong piece of evidence for price rigidities in brick-and-mortar retail (recently

documented by DellaVigna & Gentzkow, QJE 2019 and Hitsch, Hortacsu, Lin, QME forthc.). Walmart entry leads to a large drop in revenue of incumbent retailers but no price adjustment. Managerial inattention / simple pricing rules are the most likely driver.

4) Frontiers: The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Noncompliance with Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Mktg Sc Frontiers) by @andsimonov, @sacher_szymon, @jdube6, @shirshobiswas.

This is paper nicely fits into the new frontiers section aimed at

generating research on current topics faster. It makes use of the channel position instrument from Martin & Yurukoglu (AER 2017) to estimate the causal impact of watching Fox News and other channels on social distancing behavior (measured by mobile phone movements).

5) TV Advertising Effectiveness and Profitability: Generalizable Results From 288 Brands (Econometrica) by @btshapir, @Guenter_Hitsch, @tuchmanna.

A huge data gathering & cleaning effort as well as providing a

unified framework across many categories underpins this broad analysis of advertising effects across hundreds of brands. The paper finds ad elasticities that are much smaller than previous estimates and a negative marginal ROI in most cases.

🎄 Merry Christmas everybody! 🎄