The Role of Retail Prices and Promotions in Determining Cigarette Brand Market Shares

Over the past two decades, two forms of price competition have emerged within the cigarette industry: the introduction and spread of discount and deep discount cigarettes and the increased use of price-related promotions. In this paper, we use quarterly market-level, scanner-based data on cigarette prices, promotions, and sales for 50 US markets over the period from 1994-IV through 2002-II to examine the impact of price and promotions on market shares for premium, discount, and deep discount brand cigarettes. Our estimates indicate that changes in relative prices, including those resulting from promotions, account for much of observed changes in market shares.     

Sales Promotion and Cooperative Retail Pricing Strategies

Supermarket retailers make strategic pricing decisions in a high-frequency, repeated game environment both in buying and selling fresh produce. In this context, there is some question as to whether a non-cooperative equilibrium can emerge that produces margins above the competitive level. Supermarket pricing results from tacitly collusive equilibria supported by trigger price strategies played in upstream markets. Upstream activities are, in turn, driven by periodic retail price promotions. This hypothesis is tested using a sample of fresh produce pricing data from 20 US supermarket chains. The results support the existence of tacitly collusive non-cooperative equilibria in upstream and downstream markets.     

Price promotions in emerging markets

How should price promotion strategies be modified in an emerging market (e.g., India, China) compared to those employed in developed markets (e.g., USA, Canada)? Specifically, how should the presence of middle-class consumers with limited ability to pay, prevalent in an emerging market, influence the depth and frequency of price promotions offered by competing firms? Lay intuition suggests that firms should promote more frequently and offer deeper discounts in emerging markets, in order to effectively sell to limited income, middle-class consumers. We construct a theoretical model that investigates the effect of the middle-class segment on firms' price promotion strategies. Contrary to lay intuition, our analysis reveals precisely the opposite results. First, price promotions offered in an emerging market (with middle-class consumers) are shallower than those offered in a developed market (without middle-class consumers). Second, relatively deep price promotions occur less frequently in an emerging market, compared to a developed market. These theoretical findings are consistent with the empirical evidence we gathered from the supermarkets in India and in Canada.     

万科:降价的背后

在大势不好的情况下,这家国内最大的房地产开发商正在为了将来而战。9月底,位于北京丰台区小屯路的万科中粮假日风景(紫苑)推出了10套特价房,每套单价仅为11000元左右,而此前同样户型的单价约在14000元左右,相当于打了8折。不久前,记者的手机也收到了位于北京顺义区的万科四季花城的促销短信,部分特价房起价仅为6800元,较之此前7500元的价格也打了9折。     

Joint determination of inventory replenishment and sales effort with uncertain market responses

An optimal joint operational and marketing decision is crucial for robust supply chain management. This paper addresses concurrent determination of inventory replenishment and sales effort decisions such as price, incentives to salesforce, and short-term promotions, or a combination of them. Market responses to sales efforts are typically highly uncertain, and demand in each period has its distribution dependent on the selected sales effort. In each period a replenishment order may be issued, which incurs both fixed and variable ordering costs, and at the same time the sales effort is also determined, the execution of which may incur costs. For such a model, the previously developed methods which are used for the joint inventory-pricing models become inadequate. A computational procedure for obtaining an optimal joint policy is addressed, and the conditions for the optimality of that policy are identified.     

A big data driven framework for demand-driven forecasting with effects of marketing-mix variables

This study aims to investigate the contributions of promotional marketing activities, historical demand and other factors to predict, and develop a big data-driven fuzzy classifier-based framework, also called “demand-driven forecasting,” that can shape, sense and respond to real customer demands. The availability of timely information about future customer needs is a key success factor for any business. For profit maximization, manufacturers want to sense demand signals and shape future demands using price, sales, promotion and others economic factors so that they can fulfil customer's orders immediately. However, most demand forecasting systems offer limited insight to manufacturers as they fail to capture contemporary market trends, product seasonality and the impact of forecasting on the magnitude of the bullwhip effect. This paper aims to improve the accuracy of demand forecasts. In order to achieve this, a back-propagation neural network-based model is trained by fuzzy inputs and compared with benchmark forecasting methods on a time series data, by using historical demand and sales data in combination with advertising effectiveness, expenditure, promotions, and marketing events data. A statistical analysis is conducted, and the experiments show that the method used in the proposed framework outperforms in optimality, efficiency and other statistical metrics. Finally, some invaluable insights for managers are presented to improve the forecast accuracy of fuzzy neural networks, develop marketing plans for products and discuss their implications in several fields.     

Mergers when firms compete by choosing both price and promotion

We analyze the bias from predicting merger effects using structural models of price competition when firms actually compete using both price and promotion. We extend the standard merger simulation framework to allow for competition over both price and promotion and ask what happens if we ignore promotional competition. This model is applied to the super-premium ice cream industry, where a merger between Nestlé and Dreyer's was challenged by the Federal Trade Commission. We find that ignoring promotional competition significantly biases the predicted price effects of a merger to monopoly (5% instead of 12%). About three-fourths of the difference can be attributed to estimation bias (estimated demand is too elastic), with the remainder due to extrapolation bias from assuming post-merger promotional activity stays constant (instead it declines by 31%).     

Price Formation Under Small Numbers Competition: Evidence from Land Auctions in Singapore

This article examines the price formation process under small numbers competition using data from Singapore land auctions. The theory predicts that bid prices are less than the zero-profit asset value in these first-price sealed-bid auctions. The model also shows that expected sales price increases with the number of bidders both because each bidder has an incentive to offer a higher price and because of a greater likelihood that a high-value bidder is present. The empirical estimates are consistent with auction theory and show that the standard land attributes are reflected in auction prices as expected.     

Strategic promotion tournaments and worker performance

In this analysis I study promotion schemes as human resource management strategies by which the firm can realize strategic goals by motivating workers to higher levels of effort and performance. Using information on promotions, wages, and performance for professional workers in a cross‐section of establishments in four metropolitan areas of the United States, I investigate empirically the proposition that firms strategically organize promotion tournaments to motivate workers to higher levels of performance. I present evidence suggesting that relative performance of workers determines promotions, supporting the notion of internal promotion competitions in which internal hiring policies and fixed job slots combine to create competitions among workers of a given rank in a firm. I then estimate a structural model of promotion tournaments that simultaneously accounts for worker and firm behavior and how the interaction of these behaviors gives rise to promotions. The results are consistent with the prediction of tournament theory that workers are motivated by larger spreads. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pricing and Product Positioning with Relative Consumer Preferences*

Frequent price promotions force consumers to continuously reassess their preferences over product offerings. When this leads consumers to exhibit a bias of “relative thinking”, such as may be triggered by a focus only on the most salient product attribute, we show in a model of sales (Varian, H. R., 1980, American Economic Review, 70(4), pp. 651–659) that this profoundly alters firms' pricing and product-positioning strategies. Vertical differentiation becomes more likely, with firms preferring to occupy the low-quality space in particular when they have few loyal consumers. More generally, product positioning now depends on the composition of consumers' consideration sets.     

Job Characteristics and Labor Market Discrimination in Promotions

We extend promotion signaling theory to generate new testable implications concerning racial differences in promotions. In our model, promotions signal worker ability. When tasks differ substantially across job levels, the opportunity cost of not promoting qualified non‐whites/non‐Asians is large, so employers are less likely to inefficiently withhold their promotions. Thus, given prepromotion performance, the extent to which non‐whites/non‐Asians have lower promotion probabilities decreases when tasks vary more across levels. Racial differences in wage increases at promotion diminish when tasks vary more across levels. Evidence from a single firm's personnel records supports the model's predictions concerning promotion probabilities.     

An analysis of intrabrand competition in the franchise industry

The owner of a franchise chain is analyzed as maximizing profit by selecting the number of establishments, an initial franchise fee, and a royalty on sales revenue. The franchisees are geographically dispersed and imperfectly compete with one another (intrabrand competition). Then, the optimal sales royalty must be strictly positive. If the royalty were set equal to zero, the equilibrium price would be too low to maximize collective profit; the effect of the royalty is to curtail each franchisee's private gain from reducing price. The optimal royalty rises with the intensity of intrabrand competition. The model predicts a positive association of the sales royalty with the density of the chain's establishments. The available evidence is consistent with this prediction.Parts of this paper are based on chapter III of my dissertation (Schmidt, 1990). Further research was supported by the Graduate School of the University of New Hampshire. I would like to thank Roger Blair, David Bradford, Darlene Chisholm, Jon Hamilton, Amy Schmidt, Ed Zabel, and two anonymous referees for their helpful advice. The usual caveat applies.     

企业兼容竞争的博弈分析

本文以双寡头博弈模型为基础，考察了产品兼容对企业价格和利润的影响，就在位企业和新进入企业如何利用兼容策略增强其竞争力进行了分析。本文的结论是，借助于历史销售优势和适当的兼容策略，优势企业可以设置策略壁垒来阻止潜在进入者的进入和胁迫市场内的竞争对手退出市场，劣势企业也可以凭借生产兼容性能相当优越或单向兼容的产品参与市场竞争。     

VMCI 下基于批发价决策权转移的供应链效率改进研究

本文在VMCI 模式下,考虑销售努力水平对市场需求的影响,研究批发价决策权由供应商转移至零售商的两级供应链效率改进问题。假定零售商决策批发价和销售努力水平,供应商决策寄售量,建立了零售商主导的Stackelberg 博弈模型,证明了集中决策下的最优解和分散决策下的均衡解均存在且唯一,集中决策下的寄售因子大于分散决策下的对应值。随后,引入收入共享与销售努力成本共担契约,论证了系统中寄售因子保持不变、批发价降低,且当契约参数满足一定条件时,可实现帕累托改进,实现供应链的效率改进。最后,分析了契约参数对于系统决策变量及利润的影响。     

New Evidence on Gender Differences in Promotion Rates: An Empirical Analysis of a Sample of New Hires

Using a large sample of establishments drawn from the Multi‐City Study of Urban Inequality employer survey, we studied gender differences in promotion rates and in the wage gains attached to promotions. Several unique features of our data distinguish our analysis from the previous literature on this topic. First, we have information on the wage increases attached to promotions, and relatively few studies on gender differences have considered promotions and wage increases together. Second, our data include job‐specific worker performance ratings, allowing us to control for performance and ability more precisely than through commonly used skill indicators such as educational attainment or tenure. Third, in addition to standard information on occupation and industry, we have data on a number of other firm characteristics, enabling us to control for these variables while still relying on a broad, representative sample, as opposed to a single firm or a similarly narrowly defined population. Our results indicate that women have lower probabilities of promotion and expected promotion than men do but that there is essentially no gender difference in wage growth with or without promotions.     

An antitrust analysis of bundled loyalty discounts

Consider a monopolist in one market that faces competition in a second market. Bundled loyalty discounts, in which customers receive a price break on the monopoly good in exchange for making all purchases from the monopolist, have ambiguous welfare effects. Such discounts should not always be treated as a form of predatory pricing. In some settings, they act as tie-in sales. Existing tests for whether such discounts violate competition laws do not track changes in consumer surplus or total surplus. We apply a new test to an illustrative example based on SmithKline that assumes the “tied” market has homogeneous goods. If the tied market is characterized by Hotelling competition, bundling by the monopolist causes the rival firm to reduce its price. In numerical examples, we find that this can deter entry or induce exit.     

Supercenters,Unionized Labor,and Performance in Food Retail

This study examines the impact of unionized labor on supermarket performance, as measured by profit and sales, accounting for the competitive presence of supercenters. The results confirm prior research that shows that supercenters have negative effects on supermarket performance. Unionized supermarkets generally outperform nonunionized supermarkets. However this effect disappears when accounting for supercenters, largely because unionized stores are less likely to compete with supercenters. I find no evidence for a significant union effect on supermarket performance. The deleterious effects of supercenters are stronger for unionized stores. Unionized supermarkets utilize less full‐time labor and more labor‐saving technology than do nonunionized ones.     

Multimarket contact and sales growth: evidence from insurance

Research on pricing, profits, and firm survival has shown that multimarket contact causes mutual forbearance against competition, but has not considered the consequences of imperfect observability of competitive moves. Here, predictions are developed to explain how mutual forbearance occurs—but sometimes fails—in markets with imperfect observability. Mutual forbearance means that firms do not seek to take market share from each other through price cuts or nonprice competition, and thus that sales grow at uniform rates. Firms defect from mutual forbearance, and hence have higher sales growth, if the potential rewards are high and the likelihood of being discovered is low. This theory is tested on a panel of firms operating in the Norwegian general insurance industry. The evidence suggests that sales growth is most rapid in firms that do not meet many multimarket competitors in a given market and firms that are economically troubled. Growing or highly concentrated markets have higher heterogeneity of growth rates. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Job Satisfaction and Promotions

This paper estimates the impact of promotions and promotion expectations on job satisfaction using the 1996–2006 waves of the NLSY79 dataset. Having received a promotion in the past 2 years leads to increased job satisfaction, even while controlling for the worker’s current wage, wage rank within her peer group, and wage growth. Workers who believe a promotion is possible in the next 2 years also report higher job satisfaction. Additionally, past promotions have a lingering, but fading impact on job satisfaction.     

携程的反击

这家占据OTA（在线旅游代理）市场半壁江山的巨头正尝试改变玩法，蜕变形象，以争夺更多的想象空间。