Taking marketing strategy risks with seemingly no expected gains

This paper investigates the competitive rationale for firms to invest in marketing activities aiming to enhance valuation and achieve differentiation and competitive advantage, while carrying the strategic risks of causing unintended negative consequences. We build a stylized theoretical model where firms offering similar (homogenous) products are competing by determining their marketing strategy and pricing. Each firm must choose between several marketing activities that have different potentials of enhancing consumers’ product valuations while carrying some risk of lowering consumer valuation if unintended negative outcomes occur. The stochastic nature of marketing implies that (1) even when both firms invest the same amount of money aiming to enhance product valuations by the same level, there will be a variety of (posterior) vertical differentiation scenarios where the consumers could value either firm’s product as better as or worse than the rival’s. (2) The firms may employ marketing activities that do not even lead to gains in consumer product valuation in expectation. The duopoly model analysis indicates that associated with strategic pricing, even such stochastic marketing activities may constitute desirable strategies for two a priori symmetric firms in order to avoid a Bertrand type competition as the benefit from differentiation is found to be significant enough to offset the unintended negative outcomes. The oligopoly model analysis indicates that there is an increased incentive to take marketing risk when there is a greater level of competitive intensity in the marketplace. Preliminary experimental evidence is presented to support the main findings from theoretical model analyses. The paper thus provides important managerial implications for firms contemplating investment in seemingly risky marketing activities.

     

Cumulative Discrete Choice

We present a discrete choice model in which a consumer's impression of each alternative is based on her memory of past experience with this choice, and is stochastically updated whenever the alternative is chosen. The consumer remembers a cumulative utility index per alternative, and, when an alternative is chosen, the index is updated by the addition of a random variable, interpreted as instantaneous utility. We prove that the frequencies of choice converge, with probability 1, to limit frequencies, which can be computed from the model's parameters.     

Advertising budgets in competitive environments

Firms can approach advertising competition either by setting advertising budgets (as in the percentage of sales method) or target sales levels (as in the objective and task approach). We study firms’ incentives to adopt one or the other posture using a two-stage model of duopolistic competition. In the first stage, each firm chooses to commit either to an advertising budget, letting its sales follow from the market response function, or to a desired sales level, promising to adjust its advertising spending accordingly. In the second stage, firms choose the actual levels of their advertising budget or sales target. When prices are exogenous, we show that, due to strategic effects, if a firm benefits from its rival’s advertising (as when advertising increases awareness of the product category) then setting an advertising budget dominates setting a sales target. On the other hand, if a firm is harmed by its rival’s advertising (as when advertising increases the firm’s share of a fixed market), then committing to a sales level dominates. We extend these results in several directions and show that when firms engage in price competition as well as advertising the nature of advertising and product-market competition interact to determine whether setting an advertising budget or sales target dominates.

Relative performance as a strategic commitment mechanism

Can managers' personality traits be of use to profit maximizing firm owners? We investigate the case where managers have a variety of attitudes toward relative performance that are indexed by their type. We consider two stage games where profit maximizing owners select managers in the first stage, and these managers, knowing each other's types, compete in a duopoly game in the second stage. The equilibria of various types of competition are derived and comparisons are made to the standard case where managers are profit maximizers. We show that managers' types can be used as a strategic commitment device that can increase firm profits in certain environments. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A reflection on analytical work in marketing: Three points of consensus

This article presents three points of consensus about game-theoretic work in marketing: First, equilibrium analysis is necessary for studying situations that have strategic interactions. In many cases, empirical examination of these strategic scenarios is difficult or impossible, at least without the guidance of an equilibrium model. Second, more general models are not necessarily ??better,?? because institutional details matter. Thus, the appropriate compromise between generality and specificity depends on the scope of the research question. Finally, there should be a two-way road between theory and empirics??theory is necessary to interpret empirical results, while empirical findings should guide theoretical modeling choices.     

Dynamic Influences on Individual Choice Behavior

Research examining the process of individual decision making over time isbriefly reviewed. We focus on two major areas of work in choice dynamics:research that has examined how current choices are influenced by the historyof previous choices, and newer work examining how choices may be made toexploit expectations about options available in the future. A central themeof the survey is that if a general understanding of choice dynamics is toemerge, it will come through the development of boundedly-rational models ofdynamic problem solving that lie on the interface between economics andpsychology.     

Budget or target: the choice between input and output strategies

In many competitive environments, players need to commit either to a specific goal they will achieve (an output target) or to the resources they are willing to expend in pursuit of that goal (an input budget). We model this situation as a two‐stage game where players may compete either by setting input and letting their output follow from the environment (“leading input”), or by setting output and letting the input levels required to support the output targets follow (“leading output”). We show that when each player's output is increasing (decreasing) in his rival's input, leading input (output) dominates leading output (input).     

Procurement bidding with restrictions

In many procurement situations with simultaneously offered projects, firms face participation restrictions and can bid only on a subset of the projects. This phenomenon is prevalent in a variety of observed situations such as bidding for private label supplies, business to business procurement or government projects. We show that for the case of n bidding firms where each is restricted to bid on a subset of the offered projects, there exists a symmetric equilibrium in which each bidder has a positive expected equilibrium profit. Prices are bounded away from marginal costs even if all the bidders are homogenous. This results from the fact that there is a positive probability that each firm will find itself in the position of being the sole bidder on a project. While the equilibrium probability of bidding on a project increases with its value, it is interesting to note that the bidding probability on the projects approaches an equiprobable one as the number of bidding firms increases. We find that the equilibrium profits decrease as firms are able to bid on more of the available projects. In contrast, bidder commitment to bid on specific projects increases the equilibrium profits of all firms. We also examine the effect of heterogeneity on equilibrium profits. Greater heterogeneity in the project valuations leads to lower firm profits. On the other hand, heterogeneity among bidders in terms of the number of projects that they are constrained to bid on leads to greater profits for the firms that can bid on more projects (regardless of the mix of the firms in the industry.) Finally, we analyze the effect of uncertainty in project valuations and show greater uncertainty in project valuations (as represented by a mean preserving spread) decreases the equilibrium profits. We conclude with an empirical analysis of bidding behavior that tests the predictions of the theory. We find that the probability of bidding on a particular project is increasing in its value, decreasing in the other projects values and decreasing in the number of bidding subjects. Furthermore, the value of the bids on a project increase with its valuation and decrease with the total number of bidders.

Economics, Psychology, and Social Dynamics of Consumer Bidding in Auctions

With increasing numbers of consumers in auction marketplaces, we highlight some recent approaches that bring additional economic, social, and psychological factors to bear on existing economic theory to better understand and explain consumers' behavior in auctions. We also highlight specific research streams that could contribute towards enriching existing economic models of bidding behavior in emerging market mechanisms. This paper is based on the special session at the 6th Triennial Invitational Choice Symposium, University of Colorado Boulder, June 2004 (co-chaired by the first two authors).