Competitive Pricing in Markets with Different Overhead Costs: Concealment or Leakage of Cost Information? |
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| Authors: | EDDY CARDINAELS FILIP ROODHOOFT†‡ LUK WARLOP† GUSTAAF VAN HERCK† |
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| Institution: | Tilburg University;;Katholieke Universiteit Leuven;;Vlerick Leuven-Gent Management School. The authors want to sincerely thank the editor Richard Leftwich and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful suggestions of Margaret Abernethy, Liesbeth Bruynseels, Doug DeJong, Peter Easton, Eva Labro, Laurence van Lent, Mark Penno, Jan Potters, Richard Sansing, Jeroen Suijs, and Paula van Veen-Dirks, as well as seminar participants at the London School of Economics, Tilburg University, and the EIASM 3rd Conference on New Directions in Management Accounting. |
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| Abstract: | This paper experimentally investigates how leaders and followers in a duopoly set prices for two product markets that have different overhead costs. In a fully crossed two-by-two design, we manipulate the participants' private cost report quality as either low or high, representing the extent to which these reports reveal that product markets have different overhead costs. We show that when only the leader is given a high-quality cost report, private cost information of higher quality is better incorporated into market prices (that are observable to participants). Both the leader and follower improve in profits and their prices better reflect the differences in overhead costs because the follower infers information from the leader's prices (information leakage). In contrast, when only the follower receives a high-quality cost report, the leader's profits and prices do not improve. This occurs because the follower conceals cost information when the leader has a low-quality cost report. |
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