Quality Certificates Alleviate Consumer Aversion to Sponsored Search Advertising
CESifo, Munich, 2022
CESifo Working Paper No. 9886
We study consumer response towards sponsored search advertising and how to improve advertising performance on a large e-commerce platform. Our research design is based on a field experiment which randomizes the salience of ad disclosure to consumers, and a natural experiment which eradicates a listing-level quality certificate for all listings because of a system glitch. Results suggest that consumers dislike search advertising in our setting, but quality certificates mitigate this aversion and increase advertising sales.
Industrial Organisation
Economics of Digitization