Quality Certificates Alleviate Consumer Aversion to Sponsored Search Advertising
CESifo, Munich, 2022
CESifo Working Paper No. 9886
![](https://cesifo.org/DocImg/cesifo1_wp9886.jpg?c=1689237210)
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