No abstract

Does advertising serve to (i) increase awareness of a product, (ii) increase the likelihood that the product is considered carefully, or (iii) does it shift consumer utility conditional on having considered it? We utilize a detailed data set on consumers' shopping behavior and choices over retail bank accounts to investigate advertising's effect on product awareness, consideration, and choice. Our data set has information regarding the entire purchase funnel, i.e. we observe the set of retail banks that the consumers are aware of, which banks they considered, and which banks they chose to open accounts with. We formulate a structural model that accounts for each of the three stages of the shopping process: awareness, consideration, and choice. Advertising is allowed to affect each of these separate stages of decision-making. Our model also endogenizes the choice of consideration set by positing that consumers undertake costly search. Our results indicate that advertising in this market is primarily a shifter of awareness, as opposed to consideration or choice. Along with advertising, branch density, marital status, race and income are very significant drivers of awareness. We also find that consumers face nontrivial search/consideration costs that lead the average consumer to consider only 2.2 banks out of the 6.7 they are aware of. Conditional on consideration, branch density, the consumer's current primary bank (i.e. inertia), interest rates and education are the primary drivers of the final choice.

and Robert Fourer for providing help with AMPL and KNITRO and Hector Castro for excellent research assistance. Julie Cameron and Robert Michaels from General Growth Properties and Mike Tubridy from the ICSC shared their insights on the shopping center industry, and Bob Galvin from the NRB made available part of the shopping center data. The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Kilts Center for Marketing at the University of Chicago. Yuxin Chen served as associate editor for this article.

There is substantial literature documenting the presence of state-dependent utility with packaged goods data. Typically, a form of brand loyalty is detected whereby there is a higher probability of purchasing the same brand as has been purchased in the recent past. The economic significance of the measured loyalty remains an open question. We consider the category pricing problem and demonstrate that the presence of loyalty materially affects optimal pricing. The prices of higher quality products decline relative to those of lower quality when loyalty is introduced into the model. Given the well-known problems with the confounding of state dependence and consumer heterogeneity, loyalty must be measured in a model which allows for an unknown and possibly highly nonnormal distribution of heterogeneity. We implement a highly flexible model of heterogeneity using multivariate mixtures of normals in a hierarchical choice model. We use an Euler equations approach to the solution of the dynamic pricing problem which allows us to consider a very large number of consumer types.dynamic pricing, loyalty, state dependence, consumer heterogeneity