ارزیابی و اتحادیه ها : مدل شبکه عصبی تبلیغات و انتخاب مصرف کننده

We propose a neurally motivated network model of advertising where advertisements create complementarities among the directly observable attributes of a product, allowing a brand to obtain social value. The formalization of this process allows us to examine the indirect effects of advertising in addition to how ads might affect the decision utility of a product. We focus mainly on the externalities, both positive (spillovers) and negative (dilution), predicted by this model.

The existence of advertising is one of the major open problems in economics. It presents difficulties in traditional economic models because advertisements are meant to change the decisions of consumers. The only way this should be possible in a model with stable preferences is if (a) advertisements change the information available to the consumer, or (b) consumption of the advertisements acts as a complement to the product. We propose a model in which an advertisment indirectly acts as a complement to a product by creating complementarities among the product's characteristics. This model is based on the standard hedonic pricing model, which decomposes the utility of goods into the utilities of their characteristics (Lancaster, 1966, Rosen, 1974 and Maclennan, 1982). We modify the hedonic pricing model by asserting that (a) a decision maker's experiences change the associations he has among characteristics and (b) the characteristics attributed to a product, its “perceived characteristics”, are a function of both its objective characteristics and these associations (see Fig. 1). Specifically, associations can generate complementarities among characteristics, affecting the consumer's utility for a product. For example, in any given year, advertisers will help determine what makes a skirt fashionable, including its length, fabric and pattern. So advertisements create complementarities among sets of physical attributes, allowing the combination to be “attractive,” or “fashionable.”

We have laid out an expansion of the hedonic pricing model where advertisements create complementarities among the search attributes of a good – in essence changing the attributes of the product as seen by the consumer. This change allows us to model advertising's effect on the marginal utility of a product while maintaining a stable underlying utility function like the complementary model proposed by Becker and Murphy. Advertisements operate by modulating the associations among attributes, allowing the tangible features of a product to imply abstract cultural attributes such as a piece of clothing being fashionable. Attributing such social characteristics to a product will often change a consumer's utility for a product. We use a network model, based in psychology and neuroscience, to model how advertisements do this and how these associations interact to affect the consumer's perception of the product. Unlike Becker and Murphy's model, the complementarities we consider are between attributes instead of between the products themselves. This allows us to consider how the changes in attribute complementarities create externalities. We roughly divide these externalities into two classes, spillovers and dilution. The interconnected nature of the network model means that these externalities are almost impossible to avoid. The possible spillover effects for an industry are consistent with the observed “advertising as a public-good” problem for many agricultural products. This issue was considered prominent enough that the Agricultural Marketing Agreement act was enacted in 1937 in order to solve the problem. There are also several open debates about the necessity, role, and effects of generic advertising and how it might interact with conventional brand advertising (Bass et al., 2005). The model here provides a formal framework to consider these issues, and suggests that brand and generic advertising campaigns should divide over which attributes they aim to promote.