Willingness to pay for a message: personalized licence plate auctions in Hong Kong

We use a large sample of winning price data hand-collected from Hong Kong’s personalized licence plate auctions held from 2006 to 2018 to estimate hedonic price regressions that document the willingness to pay (WTP) for a message. A clear and concise message of emotion or humour tends to attract a high WTP. The estimated WTP effects of vanity, positive outlook and superstition are relatively small. These findings affirm that advertising messages should be clear and concise, preferably appealing to consumers’ emotion and humour.