Asymmetric Price Effects of Competition

When price dispersion is prevalent, a relevant question is what happens to the whole distribution of equilibrium prices when the number of firms changes. Using data from the gasoline market in the Netherlands, we find, first, that markets with N competitors have price distributions that first‐order stochastically dominate the price distributions in markets with N+1 firms. Second, the effect of competition is stronger for the medium to upper percentiles of the price distribution. Finally, consumer gains from competition are larger for relatively well‐informed consumers. To account for these empirical patterns, we extend Varian's [1980] model by allowing for richer heterogeneity in consumer price information.     

COLLUSION AND FIGHTS IN AN EXPERIMENT WITH PRICE‐SETTING FIRMS AND ADVANCE PRODUCTION*

We present results from 50‐round duopoly and triopoly experiments. Firms decide repeatedly both on price and quantity of a perishable good. Each firm has capacity to serve the whole market. The stage game does not have an equilibrium in pure strategies. Most markets evolve either to monopolies as a consequence of bankruptcies or to collusion at the monopolistic price. Evolution is faster in markets with two than in those with three firms. Therefore, over time average price is lower with three than with two. Consumer surplus is higher with three firms, but efficiency is lower in markets with three firms.     

Constraints in acquiring and utilizing directors' experience: An empirical study of new‐market entry in the pharmaceutical industry

In this study we provide evidence that firms considering entering new markets are more likely to appoint directors with experience in those markets; and subsequently, we show that directors' market experience increases the likelihood of new‐market entry. Moreover, we explore the presence of constraints in both, acquiring experienced directors and utilizing their experience. Specifically, we find that experienced directors are less likely to join firms with financial restatements in the recent past as well as firms with a lower status than the firms where they currently serve. In addition, we find that interlocking directors' experience is less likely to lead to new‐market entry for firms that lack new‐product development experience and that exhibit a high level of market overlap with interlocked firms. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Location choices under strategic interactions

We explore a fundamental aspect of firms' location choices largely overlooked in the literature: strategic interaction. We formalize the notion that strategic interaction renders collocation less appealing by fostering competition, which erodes firms' profits. Strategic interaction also impacts location choices across time. Specifically, because firms learn by doing in markets, location choices are shaped by two novel effects: entrenchment benefits from entering early in a market and improving capabilities relative to rivals, and opportunity costs from postponing entry to other markets where rivals enter and learn. When learning is local, firms collocate more: rivals are preempted from improving relative capabilities in higher‐value markets. However, when learning is global, firms collocate less: they can transfer capabilities from lower‐value to higher‐value markets, blocking rivals from achieving entrenchment benefits. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Mixed Oligopoly and Market Power Mitigation: Evidence from the Colombian Wholesale Electricity Market*

Using information on price bids in wholesale electricity pools and empirical techniques described in the literature on electricity markets, this study identifies the market power mitigation effect of public firms in the Colombian market. The results suggest that while private firms exercise less market power than is predicted by a profit-maximization model, there are marked differences between private and public firms in their exercise of unilateral market power. These findings support the hypothesis of the market power mitigation effect of public firms.     

Foreign IPO capital market choice: Understanding the institutional fit of corporate governance

While product market choices have been central to strategy formulation for firms in the past, the integration of financial markets makes the choice of capital markets an equally important strategic decision. We advance a comparative institutional perspective to explain capital market choice by firms making an IPO in a foreign market. We find that internal governance characteristics (founder‐CEO, executive incentives, and board independence) and external network characteristics (prestigious underwriters, degree of venture capitalist syndication, and board interlocks) are significant predictors of foreign capital market choice by foreign IPO firms. Our results suggest foreign IPO firms select a host market where the firms' governance characteristics and third party affiliations fit the host market's institutional environment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why Do Firms Enter a New Product Market? A Two‐Dimensional Framework for Market Entry Motivation and Behavior

What are the energetic forces that induce established firms to enter new product markets? While most previous research has explained the economic profits expected from a new product market as firms' distinctive motivation for market entry, some recent studies also emphasize interfirm competition and benchmarking activities as another important factor that motivates firms' new market entry. To explain the established firms' diverse new product market entry behaviors, this study presents a two‐dimensional scheme of entry motivation in terms of the degrees of target market profit focus and competitor focus. The first dimension captures the economic motivation of firms' new market entry that ranges from focusing on the direct expected profits from the target market to considering more strategic/indirect benefit incentives. The second dimension captures the degree of firms' external motivation for entry affected by competitors that ranges from independent entry decisions to fully competitor‐oriented entry decisions. Using multiple‐industry survey data, the current study empirically verifies that these two entry motivation dimensions explain a great portion of actual firms' new product market entry behaviors and that they are independent of each other. Subsequently, this study validates that firms' operational size and their environmental factors like perceived technological uncertainty and competitive intensity upon new market entry affect the degrees of the two dimensions of firms' new product market entry motivation. More specifically, large firms less emphasize target‐market profits than small firms, and when perceived technological uncertainty is high, potential market entrants become less target market profit focused but more competitor focused. Under a highly competitive new market condition, firms focus on both target‐market profits and competitors. Based on the analysis of new market entry motivation dimensions, the current study proposes a new typology of established firms' market entry behaviors. The suggested typology represents the four different types of new product market entrants and examines specific characteristics and entry strategies for each type of potential entrants. This entry‐motivation framework should provide a deeper understanding of the backgrounds of entry behaviors and assist firms in developing appropriate entry strategies and in advantageously responding to rival firms' actions with regard to entry.     

The Form of Relationship between Firm‐Level Product Innovativeness and New Product Performance in Developed and Emerging Markets

This study compares the new product performance outcomes of firm‐level product innovativeness across a developed and emerging market context. In so doing, a model is constructed in which the relationship between firm‐level product innovativeness and new product performance is anticipated to be curvilinear, and in which the nature of this relationship is argued to be dependent on organizational and environmental factors. The model is tested using primary data obtained from chief executive officers and finance managers in 319 firms operating in the United Kingdom, an advanced Western market, and 221 firms from Ghana, an emerging Sub‐Saharan African market. The model is assessed using a structural equation model multigroup analysis approach with LISREL 8.5. In the United Kingdom and Ghana, the basic form of the relationship between firm‐level product innovativeness and business success is inverted U‐shaped, but the strength and/or form of this relationship changes under differing levels of market orientation, access to financial resources, and environmental dynamism. While commonalities are identified across the two countries (market orientation helps firms leverage their product innovativeness), differences are also observed across the samples. In Ghana, access to financial resources enhances the relationship between product innovativeness and new product performance, unlike in the United Kingdom where no moderation is observed. Furthermore, while U.K. firms leverage product innovativeness to their advantage in more dynamic environments, Ghanaian firms do not benefit in this way: here, high levels of innovation activity are less useful when markets are more dynamic. If the study's findings generalize, there are a number of implications for managers of both emerging and developed market businesses. First, managers in both developed and developing market firms should focus on determining and managing an optimal balance of novel and intensive product innovativeness within the context of their unique institutional environments. Second, for emerging market firms, a market orientation capability helps businesses leverage local market intelligence, enabling them to compete with multinational giants flocking to emerging markets, but typical developed market learning approaches may be insufficient for multinational firms when seeking to compete in emerging markets. Third, for emerging market firms, access to finances helps deliver product innovation success (although this is not the case for developed market firms, possibly due to strong financial institutions). Finally, unlike developed market firms, burdened by institutional voids at home, emerging market firms appear to be less capable of competing on an innovation front in more dynamic market conditions. Accordingly, policymakers in emerging markets should consider identifying ways to help businesses raise market orientation levels, and seek to create conditions that enhance access to financial capital (e.g., direct financing, matching grants, tax rebates, or rewarding firms that innovate creatively and intensely). Likewise, since environmental dynamism is likely to be a growing issue for emerging markets, efforts to help firms become more adept at keeping up with more agile developed market counterparts are needed.     

Localized Competition,Heterogeneous Firms and Vertical Relations

This paper investigates the link between firms' geographic configuration and market power in imperfect markets. We consider two related setups. The first illustrates the relevant characteristics of the pricing equilibrium. A main implication is that the equilibrium price vector changes in accordance with the firms' spatial configuration. The second, where firms operate as downstream retailers affiliated to rival upstream wholesalers, shows that upstream market power is strongly affected by an index of geographic concentration which reflects the spatial configuration of retailers. Finally, our analysis provides several insights for market delineation as well as merger evaluation and remedies.     

New Product Development in Rapidly Changing Markets: An Exploratory Study

Rapid technological change can be both a blessing and a curse. For example, investors and firms of all sizes hope to reap the rewards that may arise from the apparent convergence of the computer, telecommunications, and entertainment industries. With the high level of uncertainty inherent to such rapidly changing markets, however, those potentially dazzling returns are counterbalanced by a daunting level of risk. John Mullins and Daniel Sutherland suggest that firms operating in such markets require NPD practices that can mitigate risk, manage uncertainty, and, of course, increase the likelihood of new product success. To gain insight into the NPD practices that can meet those challenges, they conducted in-depth interviews with managers who were directly involved in NPD projects at US WEST, Inc., a large, multinational firm in the telecommunications industry. The study focused on identifying practices that help the firm bring new products into rapidly changing markets quickly, efficiently, and effectively. A key objective of their study was to go beyond the basics—for example, the use of cross-functional teams—to identify specific practices that allow the firm to address the various levels of uncertainty that characterize its markets. They identify three levels of uncertainty that confront firms operating in rapidly changing markets. First, potential customers cannot easily articulate needs that a new technology may fulfill. Consequently, NPD managers are uncertain about the market opportunities that a new technology offers. Second, NPD managers are uncertain about how to turn the new technologies into products that meet customer needs. This uncertainty arises, not only from customers' inability to articulate their needs, but also from managers' difficulties in translating technological advancements into product features and benefits. Finally, senior management faces uncertainty about how much capital to invest in pursuit of rapidly changing markets as well as when to invest. The study identifies six practices that help the firm address the uncertainty and risk inherent in its rapidly changing markets. For example, market research in this firm's NPD process focuses more on probing than it does on measuring. Involvement of prospective customers in idea generation and the use of prototypes early in the NPD process help the firm uncover customer needs and market opportunities. Large-scale, quantitative market research focuses primarily on determining market size and price points.     

Anti‐Competitive Interconnection: the effects of the elasticity of consumers' expectations and the shape of the network effects function

I find that interconnection might cause the market to be less competitive, and might lead to an increase in the price firms charge for their product. Absent interconnection, firms compete for a consumer for two reasons. The first reason is to obtain revenue from selling the product to a consumer (as in the case without network effects). The second reason is that by expanding the network by one more consumer, the product becomes more attractive to all other consumers. Interconnection eliminates the second reason—when firms interconnect, they are no longer concerned with consumers' following the crowd. I show that consumers and society might be worse off from interconnection. I focus on two factors that make the (post‐interconnection) price increase larger: consumer expectations that are highly sensitive to prices and consumers putting a high value on small increases in network size at the equilibrium market shares. Both of these factors make firms highly competitive, but only if the firms' products' networks are not interconnected.     

Bertrand Competition with an Asymmetric No‐discrimination Constraint

Regulators and competition authorities often prevent firms with significant market power, or dominant firms, from practicing price discrimination. The goal of such an asymmetric no‐discrimination constraint is to encourage entry and serve consumers' interests. This constraint prohibits the firm with significant market power from practicing both behaviour‐based price discrimination within the competitive segment and third‐degree price discrimination across the monopolistic and competitive segments. We find that this constraint hinders entry and reduces welfare when the monopolistic segment is small.     

Third-Degree Price Discrimination in Oligopoly when Markets are Covered*

We analyze oligopolistic third-degree price discrimination relative to uniform pricing when markets are covered. Pricing equilibria are critically determined by supply-side features such as the number of firms and their marginal cost differences. It follows that each firm's Lerner index under uniform pricing is equal to the weighted harmonic mean of the firm's relative margins under discriminatory pricing. Uniform pricing then lowers average prices and raises consumer surplus. We can calculate the gain in consumer surplus and loss in firms' profits from uniform pricing based only on the market data of the discriminatory equilibrium (i.e., prices and quantities).     

Cross‐Border Mergers and Market Segmentation

This paper shows that cross‐border mergers are more likely to occur in industries which serve multiple segmented markets rather than a single integrated market, given that cost functions are strictly convex. The product price rises in the market where an acquisition is made but falls in the other, decreasing the acquisition price of other firms (in contrast to the results in the existing merger literature on integrated markets). Although the sum of consumer surplus across the countries may rise in response to a given acquisition, one of the countries gains at the expense of the other.     

New Product Strategies of Large, Dominant Product Manufacturing Firms: An Exploratory Analysis

Although researchers have expended considerable effort exploring the links between new product strategy and firm-level performance, most studies of this subject focus on small- to medium-sized firms. Compared to smaller firms, however, large companies typically maintain broader portfolios of products and have easier access to capital markets. Such fundamental differences suggest the need for closer examination of the relationship between new product strategy and the performance of large firms. Based on a study of 459 new products introduced during a 5-year period, Richard W. Firth and V. K. Narayanan profile the new product strategies of 18 large companies. They examine the methods used to acquire new products (internal development or external sources) as well as three dimensions of each firm's new product introductions: newness of embodied technology, newness of market application, and innovativeness in the market. In other words, these profiles identify the degree to which a firm's new product introductions involve core technologies and markets that are new to the firm, as well as the degree to which the market views these products as innovative. Because new product strategy is an investment decision, the study also examines the relationship between these strategic profiles and two facets of firm-level performance: risk and return. The study identifies five archetypes of new product strategy: Innovators, who produce innovative products by using their existing resources; Investors in Technology, who focus on expanding their technological base. Searching for New Markets, firms that venture into unfamiliar markets by introducing products closely aligned with those in their existing portfolios; Business as Usual, firms that rely on existing technologies and products to serve existing markets; and Middle-of-the-Road, firms content to introduce new products rated as low to moderate along all three dimensions of the strategic profile. For new products closely aligned with their core markets and technologies, the firms in this study typically rely on internal development. To introduce products involving new technologies or market applications, they turn to acquisition from external sources. Firms that emphasized market innovativeness in their new product introductions enjoyed higher returns than less innovative firms. And contrary to conventional wisdom, they gained this advantage without an accompanying increase in risk. In other words, continual innovation might provide a large firm with the means for achieving higher returns without higher risk.     

Retail Mergers and Food Prices: Evidence from France

This paper analyzes the impact of a merger in the French supermarket industry on food prices. Using consumer panel data, we compare the changes in prices for merging and rival firms in affected and comparison markets. We use a novel definition of affected markets when some firms have a local pricing strategy and others a more centralized pricing strategy. We find that prices increase significantly following the merger, and that the merging firms lose market shares. For the rivals, the price increases are larger in local markets, in which concentration increased and differentiation changed after the merger.     

ON THE VALUE OF A LARGE CUSTOMER BASE IN MARKETS WITH SWITCHING COSTS*

It is usually acknowledged that firms benefit from a large customer base in markets with switching costs. However, Klemperer [1995] argues that this may not be true if an increase in the size of a firm's customer base induces fierce price competition, making the firm worse off. This paper shows that such an outcome can be obtained under standard assumptions, such as homogeneous goods and uniformly distributed switching costs. In the model, firms have very limited incentives to fight for market shares, and the notion that switching costs make markets less competitive is stronger than previously shown.     

Firm Productivity Differences From Factor Markets

We model firm adaptation to local factor markets in which firms care about both the price and availability of inputs. The model is estimated by combining firm and population census data, and quantifies the role of factor markets in input use, productivity and welfare. Considering China's diverse factor markets, we find that within an industry interquartile labor costs vary by 30–80%, leading to 3–12% interquartile differences in TFP. In general equilibrium, homogenization of labor markets would increase real income by 1.33%. Favorably endowed regions attract more economic activity, providing new insights into within‐country comparative advantage and specialization.     

The trade-off between institutionally proximal and distal markets: The impact of home market pressures on firms’ export market selection

This study uses an organizational change perspective to analyze firms' export market selection (EMS) to adapt to home country market pressures. We argue that firms' strategic objectives influence whether they will enter institutionally proximal or distal markets. A model with two curvilinear (U-shaped and inverted U-shaped) relationships is found by testing 1940 Taiwanese export firms based on two official datasets. The model shows that firms are more likely to increase their exports to institutionally proximal markets and to decrease their exports to institutionally distal markets if they have an increasing but still controllable degree of competitive and marketing pressures in the home country. This response represents an incremental change by exporting firms. However, firms increase their exports to institutionally distal markets while decreasing their exports to institutionally proximal markets if they have an excessively increasing degree of competitive and marketing pressures in the home country. This response represents a radical change by exporting firms. We find that export firms' strategic objectives in choosing different organizational change styles (incremental or radical) are highly related to this trade-off in their EMS decision making.