A 'Memory-Jamming' Theory of Advertising

I present a model in which advertising changes consumers' recollections of their past experiences with a product. The model sheds light on several important features of advertising behavior: the relationship between advertising levels and consumer experience, the relationship between advertising and product quality, and the presence of increasing returns in the consumers' response to advertising. Importantly for empirical research on advertising, the model's comparative statics call into question the ability of standard empirical tests to distinguish informative from non-informative advertising.

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