When demand is uncertain, manufacturers and retailers often have private information on future demand, and such information asymmetry impacts strategic interaction in distribution channels. In this paper, we investigate a channel consisting of a manufacturer and a downstream retailer facing a...

This paper examines the role of consumer preferences, costs, and price competition in determining the competitive product strategy of a firm. In the model studied here, there are two identical firms competing on product quality and price. They face consumers who prefer a higher quality product...

In mature markets with competing firms, a common role for advertising is to shift consumer preferences towards the advertiser in a tug-of-war, with no effect on category demand. In this paper, we analyze the effect of such “combative” advertising on market power. We show that, depending on...

In recent studies of channel competition, it has been found that channel intermediaries reduce the intensity of direct competition between manufacturers. The underlying channel structure in most studies consists of two manufacturers and two retailers each of whom sells only manufacturer's...

We investigate the nature of competitive equilibrium for brands competing in a multi-attribute product space when consumer preferences for product attributes follow nonuniform distributions. We establish subgame-perfect equilibria in a two-stage game, where firms choose positions in the first...

How can supermarkets use the vast data they have to design strategies to compete for large-basket shoppers, potentially their most profitable customers? We say, analyze the data to glean basket composition of heterogeneous consumers. Of theoretical and practical interest is the question, will...

Two concepts of brand loyalty are defined, “inertial” brand loyalty resulting from time lags in awareness, and “cost-based” brand loyalty resulting from intertemporal utility effects. Their market level implications are formally derived in a continuous time model. It is found that...

Internet Shopping Agents (ISAs) allow consumers to costlessly search many online retailers and buy at the lowest price. One would expect these ISAs to subject sellers to intense price competition that results in uniform low prices. Yet, Internet retailers have joined these ISAs. Furthermore, the...

This paper looks into the effects of information transparency on market participants in an online trading environment. We study these effects in business-to-business electronic markets with firms competing in both upstream and downstream industries. The prior literature generally assumes that...