Information versus persuasion : la controverse autour de l'impact de la publicite sur les preferences des consommateurs

Advertising remains a major topic in economics, particularly because of its impact on consumers' behavior and its impact on the demand function. While some economists consider advertising from an informative side, others focus more on its persuasive side. In this study, we affirm that this original opposition has based the economic approach to advertising on a fruitful dialectic cleavage inducing a normative bias on regulation. This original opposition mainly reveals the difficulty some economists have to clarify: 1) the relationship between advertising and the evolution of consumers' preferences; 2) the function to which advertising is related to. We propose to analyze the scope and limitations of this seminal dialectical cleavage.