Author: Simon P. Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
We study price competition in the presence of search costs and product differentiation. The limit cases of the model are the "Bertrand Paradox," the "Diamond Paradox," and Chamberlinian monopolistic competition. Market prices rise with search costs and decrease with the number of firms. Prices may initially fall with the degree of product differentiation because more diversity leads to more search and more competition. Equilibrium diversity rises with search costs, while the optimum level falls, so entry is excessive. The market failure is most pronounced for low preference for variety and high search costs.
Author: José Luis Moraga-González
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 31
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Book Description
Author: Natalia Fabra
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Competition
Languages : en
Pages : 58
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Book Description
In a seminal paper, Champsaur and Rochet (1989) showed that competing firms choose non-overlapping qualities so as to soften price competition at the cost of giving up profitable opportunities to price discriminate. In this paper we show that an arbitrarily small amount of search costs is enough to give rise to an equilibrium with overlapping qualities. In markets with search costs, competing firms face the monopolist's incentive to price discriminate, which induces them to offer the full quality range even if this forces them to compete head-to-head. Hence, even though search costs increase prices and reduce consumers surplus for given quality choices, search costs can also lead to lower prices and higher consumer surplus whenever they induce firms to offer broader and overlapping product lines. Our analysis also provides predictions regarding pricing by multi-product firms in markets with search costs under various retail market structures. Product choices and pricing by online bookstores motivate our findings.
Author: Martin Obradovits
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Especially in many online markets, consumers can readily observe prices, but may need to further inspect products to assess their suitability. We study the effects of product differentiation and search costs on competition and market outcomes in a tractable model of price-directed consumer search. We find that (i) firms' equilibrium pricing always induces efficient search behavior, (ii) for relatively large product differentiation, welfare distortions still occur because some consumers (may) forgo consumption, and (iii) lower search costs lead to stochastically higher prices, increasing firms' expected profits and decreasing their frequency of sales. Consumer surplus often falls when search costs decrease.
Author: Luis C. Corchón
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1788112784
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 547
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Book Description
This second volume of the Handbook includes original contribution by experts in the field. It provides up-to-date surveys of the most relevant applications of game theory to industrial organization. The book covers both classical as well as new IO topics such as mergers in markets with homogeneous and differentiated goods, leniency and coordinated effects in cartels and mergers, static and dynamic contests, consumer search and product safety, strategic delegation, platforms and network effects, auctions, environmental and resource economics, intellectual property, healthcare, corruption, experimental industrial organization and empirical models of R&D.
Author: José L. Moraga González
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 51
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Book Description
This paper extends the literature on simultaneous search by allowing for differentiated products and consumer search cost heterogeneity. In a duopolistic market, consumers with sufficiently low search costs choose to inspect the products of the two firms and purchase, if any, the most suitable; consumers with higher search costs choose to examine just one of the products; consumers with prohibitively high search costs do not check any of the products and drop out of the market altogether. For arbitrary search cost distributions, when match values are assumed to be uniformly distributed, a symmetric price equilibrium always exists. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the search cost distribution under which an increase in the costs of search of all consumers may result in a lower, equal or higher equilibrium price. The effects of prominence on equilibrium prices are also studied. The prominent firm charges a higher price than the non-prominent firm and both their prices are below the symmetric equilibrium price. Consequently, with simultaneous search, market prominence increases the surplus of consumers. In an extension, we provide conditions under which the equilibrium of the N-firm model exists.
Author: Simon P. Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Advertising
Languages : en
Pages : 55
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Book Description
Economists could not properly capture the impact of internet on markets without a proper theory of consumer search. As a result, this theory has been rediscovered and developed further since the early 2000s. It can address such critical questions as the impact of reduced search cost on prices, variety, and product choice as well as advertising practices (such as search advertising). This theoretical development has also fed into a rich empirical literature exploiting the wealth of data that is now available regarding both consumers' and firms' online activity. The goal of this chapter is to present the basic concepts underpinning the theory of imperfectly competitive markets with consumer search. We stress that appropriate theoretical frameworks should involve sufficient heterogeneity among agents on both sides of the market. We also explain why the analysis of ordered search constitutes an essential ingredient for modeling recent search environments.
Author: Tridib Mazumbar
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN: 9789811204173
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
The price of a product or a service is a critical element of the marketing mix. If priced too low, product sales may go up, but the product margin suffers; priced too high, customers look for other alternatives and sales may decline. Despite the critical role price plays in influencing corporate revenue and profit growths, formal training of the pricing function is often missing from business school curriculum. This book provides business students as well as managers necessary tools to make profitable pricing decisions under a variety of real-life contexts current and emerging. It offers a balance of theory, applications, and analytics to achieve the goal of arriving at appropriate pricing decisions in a competitive and changing business environment. The book begins with a framework for pricing decision and utilizes short cases and numerical illustrations to demonstrate how customer valuation, cost, and competition are triangulated to arrive at a feasible price range for a new or an existing product. Theories from economics and psychology provide conceptual foundations for price customization and segmentation, framing price offers to customers, price bundling, and other prevalent pricing practices.
Author: Andreas Hinterhuber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351732358
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
Pricing has a substantial and immediate impact on profitability. Most companies, however, still use costs or competition as their main basis for setting prices. Product or business model innovation has a high priority for many companies, yet innovation in pricing received scant attention until the first edition of this groundbreaking book. This new edition of Innovation in Pricing builds on the success of the first, examining the ways in which pricing innovation can drive profits through cutting-edge academic research and best practice case studies from leading academics, business practitioners and consultants in pricing. The second edition has been fully revised and updated according to the latest developments in pricing, with: revisions to all chapters new chapters, including a chapter on business model and pricing model innovation a new introduction that makes explicit just what strategic pricing can do for your organization. This book is the only book dedicated to innovation in pricing and is an essential read for business executives, innovation managers and pricing managers wishing to treat innovation in pricing as seriously as they treat product, service or business model innovation. It is also valuable supplementary reading for advanced students of marketing and sales.
Author: Ilya Morozov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
In the first chapter of this paper, I study how much consumers benefit from new products in markets with information frictions. I analyze new products in the U.S. hard drive market, a market with ample product innovation. Using unique browsing data, I measure the magnitude of two frictions, limited consideration and costly search, and show that both play a crucial role in shaping consumer demand. Omitting these frictions from analysis makes the researcher underestimate consumer surplus from new hard drives, as it appears that consumers do not like the attributes these hard drives offer. Partly eliminating frictions substantially increases consumers' ability to benefit from new hard drives. In the second chapter, I study the estimation of preference heterogeneity in markets where consumers engage in costly search to learn product characteristics. Costly search amplifies the way consumer preferences translate into purchase probabilities, generating a seemingly large degree of preference heterogeneity. We develop a search model that allows for flexible heterogeneity in preferences and estimate its parameters using a unique panel dataset on the search and purchase behavior of consumers. The estimation results reveal that when search costs are ignored, the model overestimates standard deviations of product intercepts by 68%. We show that the bias in heterogeneity estimates leads to incorrect inference about price elasticities and seller markups and has important consequences for targeted marketing.
