Títle: Distaste for Advertisements in Two-Sided Markets: Evidence from Free-to-Air TV
Room: E28
Time: 12:30
Abstract: This paper studies viewers' distaste for ads in a two sided-market. Using data from free-to-air TV permits us to observe the viewers' consideration set of alternatives and their characteristics. We first follow Wilbur (2008) to estimate both viewers' demand for content and advertisers' demand for advertising slots using channels' share data, advertisements' posted prices and content characteristics. We then exploit additional high-frequency data on individual choices to estimate viewers' heterogeneous distaste for ads without placing any distributional assumptions on how preferences change across consumers, following a similar strategy to Dubois, Griffith and O'Connell (2020). We find that distaste for ads is highly heterogeneous. Our approach also permits to disentangle pure distaste for ads from idiosyncratic preferences and inertia, which are relevant also for the advertisers' side of the market.