online advertising platforms can oer performance-based pricing in ways impossible with the traditional types of advertising discussed

by Anderson and Coate (2005); Ferrando et al. (2008); Reisinger (2012) or in the more general two-sided market (Armstrong, 2006). This can lead to an increase in incentives for advertising platforms to perform well. However, such work does not address the question of what the increased comparability of dierent advertising channels implies for advertising and their customers in general. Since the work of Grossman and Shapiro (1984), there has been a slew of theoretical literature that has studied the potential eects of improvements in targeting technology on advertising markets, where targeting is often modeled as ensuring that ad exposures are not wasted. However, there has been little literature that directly models what happens to advertising platform competition when advertising becomes more measurable and conversions are better-attributed. The literature on the implications of targeting improvements may still be relevant. This is because practically, improved targeting is modeled as reducing the proportion of consumers who see ads that are not relevant for them. Cross-channel ad attribution technology should achieve a similar outcome, though the process is dierent. The dierence in process is simply that targeting technologies prospectively identify better eyeballs through a theory about who responsive customers may be. Attribution technologies retrospectively use better data to identify campaigns that were more successful and therefore presumably reached better eyeballs.4 However, the end result of facilitating ads reaching more receptive eyeballs is similar. This dierence in nuance may be absent in the theoretical literature because, for reasons of simplicity, theory models focus on a static rather than multiple-period model of advertising allocation. Using this insight enables me to revisit the original cost function A(; ) that Grossman
4 Another relevant branch of theory is Halaburda and Yehezkel (2011) who study how asymmetries in quality information can lead concentration of market power to be welfare-improving.

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