We use five years of bidding data to examine the reaction of advertisers to widely disseminated press on the lack of effectiveness of brand search advertising (queries that contain the firm’s name) found in a large experiment run by eBay (Blake et al. 2015). We estimate that 11% of firms that did not face competing ads on their brand name keywords, matching the case of eBay, discontinued the practice of brand search advertising. In contrast, firms did not react to the information pertaining to the high value and ease of running experiments—we observe no change in the experiment-like variation in advertising levels. Further, while 72% of firms had sharp changes in advertising suitable for estimating causal effects, we find no correlation between firm-level advertising effects and the propensity to advertise in the future. We discuss how a principal-agent problem within the firm would lead to these learning dynamics.

中文翻译：

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企业对有关商业惯例的公共信息的反应：搜索广告的情况

我们使用五年的竞标数据来检验广告商对广泛传播的媒体的反应，这是由于eBay开展的一项大型实验中发现的品牌搜索广告（包含公司名称的查询）缺乏有效性（Blake et al.2015）。我们估计，与eBay的情况相匹配的11％的公司没有在其品牌关键字上面临竞争广告，因此停止了品牌搜索广告的做法。相比之下，公司没有对与高价值和易于进行的实验有关的信息作出反应-我们观察到广告级别的类似实验的变化没有发生变化。此外，尽管72％的公司的广告发生了急剧变化，适合估计因果关系，但我们发现公司层级的广告效果与未来广告的倾向之间没有关联。