Oligopolies with (Somewhat) Environmentally Conscious Consumers: Market Equilibrium and Regulatory Intervention

We consider a horizontally differentiated duopoly where consumers care about the product's “greenness.” Firms can be asymmetric: they may differ in the product's intrinsic value and may also differ in their chosen level of greenness. We examine the choice of greenness and the implications of various policy interventions. We show that (i) the choices of product greenness are strategic substitutes, (ii) the high‐intrinsic quality firm produces the greener product, (iii) the low‐quality firm's greenness may increase with the cost of its provision or decrease with consumer willingness to pay for it, (iv) a minimum quality standard (MQS) leads the greener firm to lower its environmental quality and can even reduce average quality, (v) greenness is underprovided even if consumers fully internalize the externality, and (v) an MQS can reduce welfare if the greenness of the high‐quality firm exceeds the MQS, even when environmental quality is underprovided. The effects of policy interventions on profits differ qualitatively across polices and firms: A firm that lobbies for one type of intervention may lobby against another similar one, and a firm may lobby for an intervention while its competitor may lobby against it. A subsidy for the development costs of a green product can financially hurt both firms.     

Strategic Quality Decisions under Heterogeneous Resource Endowments

The literature on product competition advocates a differentiation strategy assuming firm homogeneity in resources. However, firm heterogeneity in resource endowments has long been recognized in economics. Merging these two perspectives, we show that the increase in consumer preference for quality leads to firms' aggressive price competition instead of quality differentiation. As consumers look for higher quality, the cost advantage arising from superior resources increases and makes head-to-head competition more profitable than accommodating a less efficient rival. When consumers are highly concerned about quality, even a small resource difference leads a more efficient firm to initiate cutthroat price competition for market dominance.     

Strategic Invasion in Markets with Switching Costs

We investigate the role of consumer switching costs in a three-stage model in which the entrant and the incumbent firm set prices sequentially and then the consumers decide from which firm to buy. We characterize the unique subgame perfect equilibrium and find that even an entrant with a higher marginal cost may profitably invade part of the market due to the existence of switching costs. Switching costs benefit both firms but harm consumers. This model is used to understand pricing behavior in the US telecommunications industry.     

Influence of cultural divergence on consumers' perception towards reconstructed products: A qualitative enquiry

The purpose of this study is to understand whether consumers from different cultures have varied perception towards reconstructed products. Cultural divergence concept provides the theoretical support for the study. Data are collected from consumers of two culturally diverse societies (India and the United States). We use grounded theory for interview and data analysis. From the data, 23 open codes and 8 axial codes for Indian consumers and 28 open codes and 8 axial codes for the American consumers are generated. The key finding of our study suggests that culture plays a decisive role in shaping consumers' perception towards reconstructed products. The other findings of our study indicate that consumers of both societies are influenced by other factors that include product‐ or process‐related factors, brand‐ or store‐related factors, and individual factors. We discuss policy level, firm level, and nonprofit or charity level implications. Finally, limitation and scope for future research are outlined.     

Mafia risk perception: Evaluating the effect of organized crime on firm technical efficiency and investment proclivity

The presence of illegal organizations in economic development settings contributes to the Italian economy’s regional heterogeneity by exacerbating other inefficiencies. We aim to investigate how three indicators of awareness of criminal interest in a firm’s activities affect the latter’s efficiency, as well as examining a potential channel through which illegal activities could hinder firm performance, using a unique set of firm-level data. According to our findings, the presence of criminal network pressure in a firm’s environment reduces its technical efficiency and propensity to invest. This phenomenon is particularly strong in Italy’s underdeveloped regions, across all illicit considered and risk classes, with inefficiency doubling when the fear of crime becomes significant. A similar pattern emerges in terms of firm investment proclivity. The research findings are relevant for policymakers because they demonstrate that even the perception of a criminal threat has significant effects on a firm’s performance; consequently, enhancing legal protection could prevent significant economic and social costs.     

Personalized Pricing and Quality Customization

We embed the principal–agent model in a model of spatial differentiation with correlated consumer preferences to investigate the competitive implications of personalized pricing and quality allocation (PPQ), whereby duopoly firms charge different prices and offer different qualities to different consumers, based on their willingness to pay. Our model sheds light on the equilibrium product-line pricing and quality schedules offered by firms, given that none, one, or both firms implement PPQ. The adoption of PPQ has three effects in our model: it enables firms to extract higher rents from loyal customers, intensifies price competition for nonloyal customers, and eliminates cannibalization from customer self-selection. Contrary to prior literature on one-to-one marketing and price discrimination, we show that even symmetric firms can avoid the well-known Prisoner's Dilemma problem when they engage in personalized pricing and quality customization. When both firms have PPQ, consumer surplus is nonmonotonic in valuations such that some low-valuation consumers get higher surplus than high-valuation consumers. The adoption of PPQ can reduce information asymmetry, and therefore sellers offer higher-quality products after the adoption of PPQ. Overall, we find that while the simultaneous adoption of PPQ generally improves total social welfare and firm profits, it decreases total consumer surplus.     

Contractual structures and consumer misperceptions

We analyze how firms can design contracts to strategically induce consumer misperceptions. A fraction of consumers is naive and underestimates the costs of claiming a warranty payment in the event of product breakdown. This leads to an inference error that makes consumers prone to overpredict product quality, which a firm can profitably exploit. The channel persists under different market structures and can reduce the quality provision to sophisticated consumers. We argue that our results apply more generally to cases in which consumers are inattentive or illiterate with respect to contract fine print, and provide supporting evidence from TV infomercials.     

Consumer Search with Limited Product Evaluation

Consumers need not evaluate all available product information before making a purchase. This may arise because shopping environments prevent a full evaluation (e.g., online). We develop a model of simultaneous search in which consumers have limited ability in product evaluation in order to study the impact of search cost on prices, consumer surplus, and social welfare. If consumers are endowed with the ability to choose how much information to acquire from a searched product, they may choose limited product evaluation. We find that consumers may evaluate more firms, enjoy lower prices, and higher surplus despite this limited ability. This implies that prices can decrease and consumer surplus can increase in search costs. We then extend our setting to the case of multiproduct firms and find similar effects due to changes in within‐firm search costs.     

The strategic effect of retailers' in‐store advertising services under product variety competition

We study a retailer service model of in‐store advertising, in which a neutral retailer provides product information to consumers for free but charges manufacturers. Our results show that the retailer's optimal pricing induces the manufacturers to decrease the number of items they offer. Nevertheless, this relaxes the competition between the manufacturers so that they benefit from using the in‐store service, unless the cost of communicating with consumers about the between‐firm products is lower. Furthermore, the service can be made socially beneficial by reducing the inefficiency resulting from an excessive number of items when manufacturers are not well differentiated.     

Marketing Innovation

This paper provides an economic analysis of marketing innovation. A dynamic duopoly model is developed to study two forms of marketing innovation: γ, which allows a firm to acquire consumer information effectively; and σ, which reduces consumer transaction costs. The incentives and effects of marketing innovation differ markedly from those of product or process innovations. Although γ benefits the innovating firm, it hurts some consumers; and, while σ benefits all consumers, it may or may not benefit the innovating firm. Increased competition intensity reduces the value of γ but increases the value of σ. The private incentive is too high for γ but too low for σ.     

Behavior‐ and characteristic‐based price discrimination

We develop a model of behavior‐ and characteristic‐based discriminatory pricing where consumers are heterogeneous both in tastes and in price sensitivity. Each firm is able to distinguish between the consumers that have bought from it and those that have bought from the rival. Furthermore, each firm learns the price sensitivity of their own consumers. We show that using this additional information may yield higher profits than uniform pricing provided that consumers are heterogeneous enough with respect to price sensitivity. We also discuss consumer surplus implications of such behavior‐ and characteristic‐based price discrimination, and we show that the impact of price discrimination depends on both the consumer type and the level of consumers’ heterogeneity.     

美国联邦质量责任担保法规

文章通过简要介绍美国联邦质量责任担保法规体系中的3种法律,希望对我国的产品质量安全法律法规体系的建立提供参考借鉴意义。其中迈哥努森-莫斯担保法是管理消费者产品担保的联邦法律,其目的是阻止制造商制定不公平的消费者担保,而且通过裁定律师费用来使得消费者提起担保诉讼在经济上成为可行;统一商业法是管理产品销售合同的主要法律来源,向消费者提供关于柠檬问题的一种可供选择的法律措施;1995年及以后生产的轿车和卡车排放担保是联邦要求排放控制担保可以保护车主以免承担因为与排放有关的某些诸如由材料或工艺上的制造缺陷造成的,或引起汽车超过联邦排放标准故障的修理成本。     

Vertical differentiation,product innovation,and dynamic competition

This paper presents an infinite horizon dynamic model in which two firms compete in a market vertically differentiated by the qualities of their products and consumers have heterogeneous preferences for quality. Given the product qualities offered, the firms engage in price competition that segments the market. In each period each firm can spend on product innovation that if successful increases the quality of its product. Three types of Markov perfect equilibria are identified. A running–coasting equilibrium exhibits increasing quality dominance with one firm undertaking innovation and the other coasting to free ride on the innovation by the first firm. The firm that coasts can have the larger dynamic payoff, so quality dominance does not imply payoff dominance. A second is a leap‐frog equilibrium in which the trailing firm undertakes innovation to leap into the lead. The trailing firm never innovates solely to narrow the gap with the leader, so catch up strategies are never used. In the third both firms undertake innovation, but if both have innovation successes, product differentiation remains the same and profits are reduced by the cost of innovation. The rivalry between Intel and AMD in microprocessors for personal computers provides a motivating example.     

Postsearch uncertainty,product heterogeneity,and price divergence

We develop a consumer search model in which consumers may remain uncertain about product quality even after inspecting the product. We first consider the postsearch uncertainty regarding vertical quality, and characterize the separating equilibrium in which firms with different quality levels charge different prices. If quality information is not sufficiently transparent after the search, then prices between the low- and the high-quality products can either diverge or converge as the search cost decreases, depending on the degrees of horizontal and vertical product differentiation. We further extend the model to include the postsearch uncertainty about the horizontal match value and to endogenize the firm's quality choice.     

Reference Dependence and Market Competition

This paper examines the implications of consumer reference dependence for market competition. If consumers take some product (e.g., the first product they consider) as the reference point when evaluating others and they exhibit loss aversion, then the more “prominent” firm whose product is taken as the reference point by more consumers will randomize between a high and a low price. We also find that consumer loss aversion in the price dimension intensifies competition while that in the product dimension softens competition. With consumer reference dependence, asymmetric prominence can arise as an equilibrium outcome when firms advertise before engaging in price competition.     

When (not) to indulge in ‘puffery’: the role of consumer expectations and brand goodwill in determining advertised and actual product quality

We analyze why some firms advertise product quality at a level different from the actual quality of a product. By considering the interacting effects of product quality and advertising, we develop a dynamic model of consumer expectations about product quality and the development of brand goodwill to determine the optimal values for the decision variables. The model parameters are determined based on prior literature and we use numerical techniques to arrive at the solution. We then derive conditions under which a firm will find it optimal to overstate or understate product quality. The results suggest that quality may be overstated in markets characterized by high price sensitivity, low quality sensitivity, low brand loyalty, and high source credibility, suggesting the need for vigilance on the part of consumers, upper level managers and regulatory authorities in such market conditions. This is important because current regulatory resources are insufficient to reduce deceptive advertising practices (Davis JJ. 1994. Ethics in advertising decision‐making: implications for reducing the incidence of deceptive advertising. Journal of Consumer Affairs 28 : 380–402). Further, the law of deceptive advertising prohibits some advertising claims on the ground that they are likely to harm consumers or competitors (Preston IL, Richards JI. 1993. A role for consumer belief in FTC and Lanham Act deceptive advertising cases. American Business Law Journal 31 : 1–29). Also, Nagler (1993. Rather bait than switch: deceptive advertising with bounded consumer rationality. Journal of Public Economics 51 : 359–378) shows that deceptive advertising causes a net social welfare loss and a public policy effectively preventing deception will improve social welfare. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developing the e-commerce sector for the fishery industry: What business are we really in?

In this study, we use the theory of the marketing firm to explain marketing relationships between consumers and firms selling fish in the context of developing the e-commerce sector for the fishery industry. We use a unique dataset composed of quantitative and qualitative data to provide a behavioral economic analysis and interpretation. The results reveal interdependent managerial and consumer behavioral relationships, indicating the presence of bilateral contingencies. The results also provide some indication of the theory of transaction cost, where cost-intensive activities are likely to be internalized within marketing firms selling fish.     

Price Dynamics and Consumer Learning

This paper studies the price dynamics induced by strategic firm behavior in the presence of consumer learning about the uncertain quality differential of the products offered by a duopoly. It is found that consumers learn slowly and that prices converge also slowly to full-information levels. A consequence is that the incentives affirms to manipulate consumers' beliefs are persistent. Although pricing tends to be aggressive at the early stages, and average prices eventually increase over time, price wars may occur at intermediate stages of the product life cycle.     

Dynamic Competition with Experience Goods

This paper considers dynamic competition in the case in which consumers are only able to learn about their preferences for a certain product after experiencing it. After trying a product a consumer has more information about that product than about untried products. When competing in such a market firms with more sales in the past have an informational advantage because more consumers know their products. If products provide a better-than-expected fit with greater likelihood, taking advantage of that informational advantage may lead to an informational disadvantage in the future. This paper considers this competition with an infinite horizon model in a duopoly market with overlapping generations of consumers. Two effects are identified: On one hand marginal forward-looking consumers realize that by purchasing a product in the current period will be charged a higher expected price in the future. This effect results in reduced price sensitivity and higher equilibrium prices. On the other hand, forward-looking firms realize that they gain in the future from having a greater market share in the current period and compete more aggressively in prices. For similar discount factors for consumers and firms, the former effect is more important, and prices are higher the greater the informational advantages. The paper also characterizes oscillating market share dynamics, and comparative statics of the equilibrium with respect to consumer and firm patience, and the importance of the experience in the ex post valuation of the product.     

Strategic stocking for new products to signal quality information

This paper investigates the signaling role of stocking for new experience products in a two-period setting. The seller privately observes the product quality information, which cannot be resolved until the second selling period. We show that the stocking plays a pivotal role in signaling the quality information, and the equilibrium strategy depends highly on ordering cost and the consumer prior belief about the seller type. If the seller is unable to dynamically decide the retail prices, separating equilibrium arises more frequently and such a fixed pricing may result in a win-win situation for both seller and consumers.