Digital supply chain management in the videogames industry: a systematic literature review

As industries mature, they rely more heavily on supply chain management (SCM) to ensure effective operations leading to greater levels of organisational performance. SCM has been widely covered in many industrial areas and, in line with other burgeoning sectors such as Tourism, an industry focus provides the opportunity to look in-depth at the context-based factors that affect SCM. Developments in digital distribution and rapid technological innovations have resulted in an increased focus on Digital Supply Chains (DSCs), which bring about significant changes to how consumers, customers, suppliers, and manufacturers interact, affecting supply chain design and processes. Through a systematic review of the Videogames Industry Supply Chain Management literature, which serves as a pertinent contextual example of a DSC, we look at how supply chains are affected by structural, market and technological change, such as increased platformisation, disintermediation and the proliferation of digital distribution. We distil these findings into a new research agenda, which identifies themes in line with extant DSC research, provides a series of relevant practice recommendations and identifies opportunities for future research

Non-risk price discrimination in insurance: market outcomes and public policy

This paper considers price discrimination in insurance, defined as systematic price variations based on individual customer data but unrelated to those customers’ expected losses or other marginal costs (sometimes characterised as “price optimisation”). An analysis is given of one type of price discrimination, “inertia pricing,” where renewal prices are higher than prices for risk-equivalent new customers. The analysis suggests that the practice intensifies competition, leading to lower aggregate industry profits; customers in aggregate pay lower prices, but not all customers are better off; and the high level of switching between insurers is inefficient for society as a whole. Other forms of price discrimination may be more likely to increase aggregate industry profits. Some public policy issues relating to price discrimination in insurance are outlined, and possible policy responses by regulators are considered. It is suggested that competition will tend to lead to increased price discrimination over time, and that this may undermine public acceptance of traditional justifications for risk-related pricing

Competitive price-matching guarantees under imperfect store availability

Price-matching guarantees, Competition, Availability, Retail operations, C72, D43, L41,

Commitment to a strategy of uniform pricing in a two-period duopoly with switching costs

Behavior-based price discrimination, Switching cost, Customer poaching, L13, D43, M21,

Experimental duopolies under price guarantees

In a symmetric differentiated experimental duopoly we test the ability of Price Guarantees (PGs) to raise prices above the competitive levels. Different types of PGs (‘aggressive’ and ‘soft’ price-beating and price-matching) are implemented either as an exogenously imposed market rule or as a business strategy. Our results show that PGs may lead close to the collusive outcome, depending on whether the interaction between duopolists is repeated and provided that the guarantee is not of the ‘aggressive’ price-beating type

Are low-price promises collusion guarantees? An experimental test of price matching policies

Price-matching guarantees, Experimental economics, C91, L11,

Measuring market power when firms price discriminate

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Empirical Economics. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-017-1251-4© 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. We propose conduct parameter-based market power measures within a model of price discrimination, extending work by Hazledine (Econ Lett 93:413–420, 2006) and Kutlu (Econ Lett 117:540–543, 2012) to certain forms of second-degree price discrimination. We use our model to estimate the market power of US airlines in a price discrimination environment. We find that a slightly modified version of our original theoretical measure is positively related to market concentration. Moreover, on average, market power for high-end segment is greater than that of low-end segment