Determinants of trademark dilution

A hierarchical Bayes associative network model for brand information is developed and tested to measure the extent of harm from trademark dilution. In the proposed model, category activation thresholds are modeled in terms of brand/category familiarity, activation flows are modeled in terms of relative category knowledge, and consumer confusion and its correlates are used to capture the asymmetric effects of dilution on retrieval probabilities for first and second users.