Three essays in industrial organization

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1988.Includes bibliographical references.by Steven Robert Postrel.Ph.D

Competing Networks and Proprietary Standards: The Case of Quadraphonic Sound.

Quadraphonic audio systems failed to replace stereo in the 1970s despite backing from all the major manufacturers and recording houses. Network externalities played a significant role in this episode, and the author uses the installed-base model of J. Farrell and G. Saloner (1986) to explain quad's failure. The author finds that the introduction of competing incompatible quadraphonic systems hindered the development of a viable user base, and he argues that the systems' sponsors introduced their products in a technologically premature state in order to prevent one another from preemptively establishing the quad standard. As a result, self-fulfilling consumer and retailer expectations doomed quadraphonic sound. Copyright 1990 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Optimal Category Pricing with Endogenous Store Traffic

We propose a dynamic programming framework for retailers of frequently purchased consumer goods in which the prices affect both the profit per visit in the current period and the number of visitors (i.e., store traffic) in future periods. We show that optimal category prices in the infinite-horizon problem also maximize the closed form sum of a geometric series, allowing us to derive meaningful analytical results. Modeling the linkage between category prices and future store traffic fundamentally changes optimal pricing policy. Optimal pricing must balance current profits against future traffic; under general conditions, optimal long-run prices are uniformly lower across all categories than those that maximize current profits. This result explains the empirical generalization that category demand in grocery stores is inelastic. Parameterizing profit per visit and store traffic reveals that, as future traffic becomes more sensitive to price, retailers should increasingly lower current prices and sacrifice current profits. We also determine how the burden of drawing future traffic to the store should be distributed across categories; this is the foundation for a new taxonomy of category roles.marketing, dynamic programming, pricing, optimization, retailing, store traffic