Product Lines and Price Discrimination in the European Car Market

In this paper we consider a model of oligopolistic competition where firms make a two-dimensional product line decision. They choose a location in style space, thus inducing horizontal differentiation, and produce different qualities (a product line) of a given good (vertical differentiation), consumed by a population of customers who differ in their income and preference for style. We prove the existence of a non-cooperative equilibrium and show that, as the degree of competition increases, prices approach marginal cost. The approach is used to show that European car producers seem indeed to use product lines to discriminate across EU countries