Knowledge that Transforms

Exclusive advertising on a given media outlet is usually profitable for an advertiser because consumers are less aware of competing products. However, for such arrangements to exist, media must benefit as well. We examine conditions under which such exclusive advertising contracts benefit both advertisers and media outlets (referred to as stations) by illustrating that exclusive equilibria arise in a theoretical model of the media, advertisers, and consumers who participate in both the product and media markets. In the model, stations sell advertising space to advertisers and broadcast advertising messages to consumers. Conditions leading to higher equilibrium levels of advertising can be unprofitable for advertisers because high levels of advertising make consumers better informed and thus lead to fiercer product price competition. As a result, media stations may be less profitable as well because their payoff is determined as a fraction of the advertiser surplus generated in the product market. Stations mitigate this effect by offering advertisers exclusive advertising contracts. With such contracts, consumers are less informed about competing products, yielding higher producer surplus. It is profitable for stations to offer exclusivity when commercial advertising is an important means for advertisers to inform consumers about their products.

We propose and test new adaptive question design and estimation algorithms for partial profile conjoint analysis. Polyhedral question design focuses questions to reduce a feasible set of parameters as rapidly as possible. Analytic center estimation uses a centrality criterion based on consistency with respondents' answers. Both algorithms run with no noticeable delay between questions. We evaluate the proposed methods relative to established benchmarks for question design (random selection, D-efficient designs, adaptive conjoint analysis) and estimation (hierarchical Bayes). Monte Carlo simulations vary respondent heterogeneity and response errors. For low numbers of questions, polyhedral question design does best (or is tied for best) for all tested domains. For high numbers of questions, efficient fixed designs do better in some domains. Analytic center estimation shows promise for high heterogeneity and for low response errors; hierarchical Bayes for low heterogeneity and high response errors. Other simulations evaluate hybrid methods, which include self-explicated data. A field test (330 respondents) compared methods on both internal validity (holdout tasks) and external validity (actual choice of a laptop bag worth approximately $100). The field test is consistent with the simulation results and offers strong support for polyhedral question design. In addition, marketplace sales were consistent with conjoint-analysis predictions.

We develop an econometric model to study a setting in which a new product is launched first in its domestic market and only at a later stage in foreign markets, and where the product's performance (“demand”) and availability (“supply”) are highly interdependent over time within and across markets. Integrating literature on international diffusion, “success-breeds-success” trends, and the theatrical motion picture industry—the focus of the empirical analysis—we develop a dynamic simultanenous-equations model of the drivers and interrelationship of the behavior of consumers (“audiences”) and retailers (“exhibitors”). Our findings emphasize the importance of considering the endogeneity and simultaneity of audience and exhibitor behavior, and challenge conventional wisdom on the determinants of box office performance (which is predominantly based on modeling frameworks that fail to account for the interdependence of performance and availability). Specifically, we find that variables such as movie attributes and advertising expenditures, which are usually assumed to influence audiences directly, mostly influence revenuesindirectly, namely through their impact on exhibitors' screen allocations. In addition, consistent with the idea that the “buzz” for a movie is perishable, we find that the longer is the time lag between releases, the weaker is the relationship between domestic and foreign market performance—an effect mostly driven by foreign exhibitors' screen allocations.