AER: Insights · 2025 · Erik Brynjolfsson、Avinash Collis、Daniel Deisenroth、Haritz Garro、Daley Kutzman、Asad Liaqat
中文摘要
由于开展大规模田野实验面临挑战，关于在线广告对消费者福利影响的研究较为有限。我们分析了Facebook上的一项长期田野实验，其中随机选取的一部分用户的信息流中不显示任何广告。通过一项激励相容的停用实验，我们在由53,083名Facebook用户构成的代表性样本中，未发现有广告组与无广告组用户对Facebook的估值存在统计显著差异。我们的样本量允许进行精确估计，这提示，要么广告带来的负效用相对较小，要么存在抵消性收益，例如产品发现。
Abstract
Research on the effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments. We analyze a long-running field experiment on Facebook in which a random subset of users received no ads in their newsfeeds. Using an incentive-compatible deactivation experiment, we find no significant differences in users’ valuation of Facebook across a representative sample of 53,083 Facebook users in the ads and no ads groups. Our sample size allows for precise estimates, suggesting that either the disutility of ads is relatively small or that there are offsetting benefits, such as product discovery. (JEL C93, D12, D44, L82, M37)