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I thought I try my hand at a 
best-of-2020 list. Here are five papers published in marketing journals in 2020 that I enjoyed reading this year …
1)Spillovers from Mass Advertising: An Identification Strategy by Michael Thomas. The paper argues that advertising in ... 1/
best-of-2020 list. Here are five papers published in marketing journals in 2020 that I enjoyed reading this year …1)Spillovers from Mass Advertising: An Identification Strategy by Michael Thomas. The paper argues that advertising in ... 1/
a given location is often partly set based on demand conditions in another location (b/c of a lack of granular targeting). Hence, demand in one market can serve as an instrument for advertising in another. This paper is a really nice addition to the recent literature ... 2/
using quasi-experimental approaches to estimating ad elasticities (see also the border approach by @btshapir and Superbowl ads by Hartmann & Klapper). It also fits with a general theme of exploiting “imperfections” in firms’ targeting strategies for identification purposes. 3/
2) Search Duration by Ursu, Wang, Chintagunta ( @ralucamursu, @pra_chintagunta). This paper provides a framework to incorporate data on search duration (rather than just identities of searched products) into a model of consumer search. Search is modeled as ... 4/
a continuous process where information is slowly revealed when searching a given product. A lot of effort goes into the complicated task of setting up and estimating a micro-founded model that rationalizes search duration decisions among several products. Substantively ... 5/
the paper pushes the boundary by allowing researchers to use additional information on consumers’ pre-purchase behavior to better understand preferences. 6/
3) Advertising in Health Insurance Markets by Brad Shapiro ( @btshapir). Almost a null effect paper, but ultimately he has sufficient power to estimate even a small effect of advertising. I see this paper as part of a growing literature that finds much smaller ad effects ... 7/
when using quasi-experimental variation to identify ad effects. The paper also shows that firms are not successful at skimming healthy individuals with advertising, a general worry in this market (a finding that runs counter to a recent AER paper by Aizawa & Kim). 8/
4) Consumer Privacy Choice in Online Advertising: Who Opts Out and at What Cost to Industry? by Johnson, Shriver, Du ( @garjoh_canuck ). The headline finding of this paper is intriguing: although many consumers state privacy concerns in surveys, almost nobody (only 0.23%) ... 9/
opts out of targeted online advertising. The paper also shows that advertisers value consumers that opt out roughly 50% less than consumers that allow for targeting. The paper punts on what explains the survey/opt out difference. Hopefully we will see more work on this. 10/
5) Social Advertising Effectiveness Across Products: A Large-Scale Field Experiment by Huang, Aral, Hu Brynjolfsson ( @ShanhHuang, @sinanaral, @erikbryn). The paper estimates the impact of social advertising across a large set of product categories. This paper is ... 11/
part of a recent trend to go beyond case studies of individual product categories and instead scale approaches across many categories to deliver more generalizable findings and to explore the underlying reasons for heterogeneity in effect size. 12/12
