Information Disclosure and Consumer Awareness

Sanxi Li, Martin Peitz and Xiaojian Zhao

No 14-28, Working Papers from University of Mannheim, Department of Economics

Abstract: Whether consumers are aware of potentially adverse product effects is key to private and social incentives to disclose information about undesirable product characteristics. In a monopoly model with a mix of aware and unaware consumers, a larger share of unaware consumers makes information disclosure less likely to occur. Since the firm is not interested in releasing information to unaware consumers, a more precise targeting technology that allows the firm to better keep unaware consumers in the dark leads to more disclosure. A regulator may want to intervene in this market and impose mandatory disclosure rules.

Keywords: Information disclosure; informative advertising; targeted advertising; consumer awareness; behavioral bias; non-common prior; consumer protection; behavioral industrial organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L51 M38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cta, nep-mic and nep-mkt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/37377/1/Li%2C_Peitz%2C_Zhao_14-28.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Information disclosure and consumer awareness (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mnh:wpaper:37377

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Mannheim, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Katharina Rautenberg ().