In social advertising, ads are targeted based on underlying social networks and their content is tailored with information that pertains to the social relationship. This paper explores the effectiveness of social advertising using data from field tests of different ads on Facebook. We find evidence that social advertising is effective, and that this efficacy seems to stem mainly from the abilit...

We consider a setting where agents select among competing products of unknown quality by costly sequential search. The agents are active on an online social network, and late movers benefit from possibly being able to see early movers’ purchase decisions. In this setting we consider the impact of advertising by firms, and the incentives of the underlying social network platform. We consider dis...