Agricultural Market Structure, Generic Advertising, and Welfare

This analysis begins with a definition and discussion of productive advertising. Then, following Dixit and Norman, persuasive advertising is used to study the welfare effects of generic advertising by marketing orders. The study first examines horizontal competition when the competing advertiser is a monopoly, and results show that the socially optimal level of advertising for a competitive marketing order is positive only if advertising raises monopoly output. Next, advertising choices of a marketing order which sells its output to a monopolistic distributor are considered. If the distributor is a monopolist, then marketing order advertising raises welfare. This finding is in marked contrast to the results for the horizontal case studied by Dixit and Norman