Real and Virtual Competition

Although the Internet reduces market frictions by making it easier for consumers to obtain information about prices and product offerings, goods sold by electronic firms are not perfect substitutes for otherwise identical goods sold by conventional stores. Online purchases, due to non-zero shipping time, are associated with waiting costs, and they do not allow consumers to inspect the product prior to purchase. Visiting a conventional store, on the other hand, involves positive travelling costs. A model extending the circular city paradigm with two types of firms, conventional and electronic, is studied. Under the benchmark setting with only conventional firms in the market, each consumer visits the nearest store and purchases the product there. When electronic firms enter the market, an intriguing type of market segmentation may arise. First, each consumer travels to the nearest conventional store to "try on" the product. Second, conventional retailers increase their prices and sell the good only to consumers who discover that they have high valuations; consumers with low valuations return "home" and order the good online. In spite of the increased competition from Internet retailers, welfare decreases.Electronic Commerce, Oligopoly Pricing, Market Segmentation, Spatial Competition.

Exposure Order Effects and Advertising Competition

This paper applies the theories of exposure order effects, developed in the psychology literature, to an industrial organization model to explore their role in advertising competition. There are two firms and infinitely many identical consumers. The firms produce a homogeneous product and distribute their brands through a common retailer. Consumers randomly arrive at the retailer and buy their most preferred brands. The order in which a consumer sees the advertising messages affects his brand preferences. Under the primacy effect the consumer prefers the brand he first saw advertised, under the recency -- the last encountered brand. The equilibrium of the advertising game is characterized separately under the primacy and the recency effects. In the first setting all consumers are initially unaware of the product existence. The equilibrium advertising intensities, remarkably, do not depend on the type of exposure order effect. In the other two settings some consumers have already formed their brand preferences. The primacy and the recency effects give rise to different equilibrium outcomes

Brand Familiarity and Product Knowledge in Customization

This paper challenges the assumption commonly used in the theoretical literature on customization that consumers always get their ideal varieties when they purchase a customized product. The author adopts Hotelling's horizontal differentiation model with two firms competing for a continuum of consumers. Each consumer has a most preferred variety and possesses a certain level of category-specific knowledge. Initially, the firms produce standard products located at the end points of the variety interval. Suppose one of the firms offers customization. Consumers familiar with the brand can easily transfer their needs into appropriate characteristics of this brand. Consumers unfamiliar with the brand have difficulty in expressing their preferences. Category-specific knowledge is crucial here. Knowledgeable consumers are more capable of analyzing information than less knowledgeable ones, and the products they design better match their preferences. The game runs as follows. First, the firms simultaneously decide whether to offer customization, then engage in price competition. The author shows that while customization makes the products less differentiated, the frictions introduced into consumer co-design activities relax price competition. As a result, customization by one of the firms occurs in equilibrium

Competitive Effects of Mass Customization

Earlier theoretical literature on mass customization maintains that customization reduces product differentiation and intensifies price competition. In contrast, operations management studies argue that customization serves primarily to differentiate a company from its competitors. Interactive involvement of the customer in product design creates an effective relationship with the firm, relaxing price competition. This paper provides a model that incorporates consumer involvement to explain the phenomena described in the operations management literature. Two firms on the Hotelling line compete for a continuum of consumers with heterogeneous brand preferences. An exogenously given fraction of consumers is potentially interested in customization. Consumer benefits from customization are the rewards from a special shopping experience and the value of product customization (better fitting product); these benefits are higher for consumers located closer to the customizing brand. When a consumer purchases a customized product, he incurs the waiting cost. The firms decide whether to offer customization, then engage in price competition. I show that customization increases the "stickiness" of a consumer to the customizing firm, leading to less intense price competition. As mass customization becomes more efficient (the lead time goes down and/or the sunk costs decrease), customization by one or both firms occurs in equilibrium. I perform comparative statics analysis with respect to the fraction of consumers potentially interested in customization

Real and Virtual Competition

Although the Internet reduces market frictions by making it easier for consumers to obtain information about prices and product offerings, goods sold by electronic firms are not perfect substitutes for otherwise identical goods sold by conventional stores. Online purchases, due to non-zero shipping time, are associated with waiting costs, and they do not allow consumers to inspect the product prior to purchase. Visiting a conventional store, on the other hand, involves positive travelling costs. A model extending the circular city paradigm with two types of firms, conventional and electronic, is studied. Under the benchmark setting with only conventional firms in the market, each consumer visits the nearest store and purchases the product there. When electronic firms enter the market, an intriguing type of market segmentation may arise. First, each consumer travels to the nearest conventional store to "try on'' the product. Second, conventional retailers increase their prices and sell the good only to consumers who discover that they have high valuations; consumers with low valuations return "home'' and order the good online. In spite of the increased competition from Internet retailers, welfare decreases

Customization: Ideal Varieties, Product Uniqueness and Price Competition

We study customization in the Hotelling model with two firms. In addition to providing ideal varieties, the perceived uniqueness of a customized product contributes independently to consumer utility. We show that only when consumer preferences for uniqueness are high customization occurs in equilibrium.customization, product differentiation, product uniqueness, price competition

Information and Online Reviews

Online review aggregators, such as TripAdvisor, HotelClub and OpenTable help consumers identify the products and services that best match their preferences. The goal of this study is to understand the impact of online review aggregators on firms and consumers. We adopt Salop’s circular city model in which consumers initially do not know the locations of the firms in the product space. The firms decide whether or not to be listed on an online review aggregator’s website and choose their prices. When a firm resorts to the aggregator, its location and price become observable to the consumers who visit the website. We consider two different scenarios, depending on the possibility for online firms to offer discounts to the consumers who book online. We show that in equilibrium not all firms will go online – some will remain offline. Online firms attract more customers than their offline counterparts due to reduced mismatch costs, but face a tougher price competition. Comparing the equilibrium prices, profits and the number of firms that go online across the scenarios, we derive interesting conclusions from the private and the social standpoints

Peer-to-Peer Networks: A Mechanism Design Approach

In this paper we use mechanism design approach to find the optimal file-sharing mechanism in a peer-to-peer network. This mechanism improves upon existing incentive schemes. In particular, we show that peer-approved scheme is never optimal and service-quality scheme is optimal only under certain circumstances. Moreover, we find that the optimal mechanism can be implemented by a mixture of peer-approved and service-quality schemes.peer-to-peer networks, mechanism design.

Advance Selling in the Presence of Experienced Consumers

The advance selling strategy is implemented when a firm offers consumers the opportunity to order its product in advance of the regular selling season. Advance selling reduces uncertainty for both the firm and the buyer and enables the firm to update its forecast of future demand. The distinctive feature of the present theoretical study of advance selling is that we divide consumers into two groups, experienced and inexperienced. Experienced consumers know their valuations of the product in advance. The presence of experienced consumers yields new insights. Specifically, pre-orders from experienced consumers lead to a more precise forecast of future demand by the firm. We show that the firm will always adopt advance selling and that the optimal pre-order price may or may not be at a discount to the regular selling price.advance selling, the Newsvendor Problem, demand uncertainty, experienced consumers, inexperienced consumers.

Clipping Coupons: Redemption of Offers with Forward-Looking Consumers

Consumer redemption behavior pertaining to coupons, gift certificates, product sampling, rebates, and the like, has been the focus of much scholarly inquiry and the extant literature has documented two noteworthy empirical regularities - a bump in redemptions close to offer expiry and greater redemption with shorter redemption windows. In the extant work, these phenomena have been explained by invoking myopic consumers. Against this backdrop, we ask a simple question: can these phenomena survive if we assume rational, forward-looking consumers? Accordingly, we develop a model consisting exclusively of forward-looking consumers and incorporate two constructs highlighted in the literature - forgetting and stochastic redemption costs. We derive consumers' period-by-period redemption rule and subsequently illustrate the emergence of the two aforementioned empirical regularities