David A. Soberman

Simultaneous Signaling and Screening with Warranties

It is well known that sellers can use warranties to screen consumers and increase profits. The ability of warranties to signal is also well accepted. The author considers a situation in which a high quality seller needs warranty policy to both screen and signal. Through an analytical model, the objective is to identify the optimal strategy for a high quality seller that offers a base warranty and optional extended warranty for a product whose quality is not observable to buyers. The author finds that signaling can limit a sellers ability to screen, especially when buyers are willing to pay a significant premium for higher quality. To signal, the seller generally lengthens base warranties and shortens optional coverage, making the bundles for each type of buyer more and more similar. The author also provides an empirical application of the model in the Toronto used-car market.

Research Note: Additional Learning and Implications on the Role of Informative Advertising

Observers argue that evidence for the persuasive role of advertising comes from competitive categories where increases in advertising lead to higher average prices. Conversely, others claim that advertising serves a purely informational role. Here, higher levels of advertising lead to better-informed consumers and this should increase competition and stimulate lower prices. The objective of this study is to neither confirm nor refute either of these perspectives. It is rather to show that increases in informative advertisingalone can lead to both higher or lower prices. I further show that the direction of this relationship depends on the level of differentiation between competing firms. Similar to Grossman and Shapiro (1984), I examine conditions where the differences between competing products are small, but I also examine conditions where the differences are significant. The role of advertising is to inform consumers about individual products and higher advertising for a product means that more of the potential market knows about it. Higher levels of advertising increase the relative importance of fully informed consumers compared to partially informed consumers. This dynamic is the basis for explaining why informative advertising can push prices either up or down in a uniformly distributed spatial market.

Behavior-Based Discrimination: Is It a Winning Play, and If So, When?

With advances in technology, the collection of information from consumers at the time of purchase is common in many categories. This information allows a firm to straightforwardly classify consumers as either “new” or “past” consumers. This opens the door for firms to implement marketing that a discriminates between new and past consumers and b entails making offers to them that are significantly different. Our objective is to examine the competitive effects of marketing that tailors offers to consumers based on their past buying behavior. In a two-period model with two competing firms, we assume that each firm is able to commit about whether or not to implement behavior-based discrimination BBD, i.e., to add benefits to its offer for past consumers in the second period. When the firms are identical in their ability to add value to the second-period offer, BBD generally leads to lower profits for both firms. Past customers are so valuable in the second period that BBD leads to cutthroat competition in the first period. As a result, the payoffs associated with the implementation of BBD form a prisoners dilemma. Interestingly, when a firm has a significant advantage over its competitor one firm has the capability to add more benefits for its past customers than the other, it can increase its profit versus the base case even when there is significant competition in the second period. Moreover, the firm at a disadvantage sometimes finds that the best response to BBD by a strong competitor is to respond with a uniform price and avoid the practice completely.

Campaign Spending Limits and Political Advertising

Traditionally, research on political campaigns has focused on the positioning of parties and not on how parties communicate with the electorate. We construct a model where two parties fund both the “creative” and “media” elements of political advertising and examine how campaign budgets affect advertising strategies in the context of a political campaign. Our key finding is that tight campaign limits stimulate aggressive advertising on the part of competing parties, while generous budgets often lead to parties acting defensively. The analysis also provides an explanation for the increasingly partisan campaigns that the Republicans and Democrats have taken in recent elections. When there is significant polarization amongst noncommitted voters and campaign spending limits are higher, we find that parties “retrench” toward traditional constituencies.

Organizational Structure and Gray Markets

Conventional wisdom suggests that when firms face a negative externality like gray marketing i.e., the selling of branded goods outside of the manufacturers authorized channels, an effective strategy to reduce the negative impact is to centralize decision making. Nevertheless, in industries with significant gray marketing, we observe many firms with decentralized decision making. Our study assesses whether decentralized decision making can be optimal when a manufacturer faces gray market distribution. We consider a market where a focal firm competes with an existing competitor that produces a differentiated product and a gray marketer that sources an identical product from a lower-priced foreign market. We find that decentralization is optimal under quantity-based competition, provided the gray market is relatively uncompetitive and the level of competitive intensity between the focal firm and the competitor is high. Decentralization leads a firm to make aggressive production decisions, which leads to lower prices, yet it also leads to higher market share for the firm compared to centralization. When the level of competitive intensity between a firm and its competitor is high, the gain in market share more than offsets the loss due to lower prices. As a result, the focal firm is better off decentralizing its operations independent of a whether the competitor operates in the foreign market, and b the competitors organizational structure. This finding contradicts the belief that centralized decision making is always optimal when authorized manufacturers attempt to limit the negative impact of gray markets. The findings also provide insight to understand why firms might employ decentralized decision making in industries where gray markets are active.

Profit-Increasing Consumer Exit

This paper examines the phenomenon of profit-increasing consumer exit and the related phenomenon of profit-decreasing consumer entry. We demonstrate that firms can be better off in shrinking markets and worse off in growing markets, even in the absence of competitive entry or exit. Specifically, firms may benefit if a segment of consumers who are relatively indifferent about consuming any product in the category leave the market. Profits can increase for all firms even if the exiting consumers have strong preferences for only one of the products in the market. In shrinking markets, it is reasonable to assume that the people who are likely to exit the market first are people who are “least committed” to the category. In particular, people who are the least satisfied with the existing offers are the most likely to change their behavior by finding an alternative or adopting a new technology. Similarly, in growing markets, consumers who enter the market late are generally the least committed to the category. Such exiting can relax the competitive pressure between firms and lead to increased profitability. Our findings provide an explanation for profit growth that has been observed in product industries exhibiting slow and predictable declines over time, including vacuum tubes, cigarettes, and soft drinks.

THE ROLE OF DIFFERENTIATION IN MARKETS DRIVEN BY ADVERTISING

Firms put enormous intellectual and financial resources into creating differentiated products or services for their consumers. However, in many situations, differentiation may not be a profitable strategy. This article spells out the conditions under which it is profitable to differentiate and those where it is not. Consumers learn about alternatives from advertising, and many consumers do not see advertising for all relevant alternatives. As a result, a significant fraction of consumers make decisions with limited information about the available alternatives. The value of creating differentiated products is ambiguous when the awareness of products and their characteristics is the key determinant of consumer behavior.

Social Responsibility and Product Innovation

This paper examines the incentives of firms to invest in socially responsible product innovations. Our analysis connects the existence of socially responsible innovations to the presence of intrinsic and extrinsic social responsibility preferences. In addition to deriving economic value from the product, consumers have heterogeneous intrinsic needs to consume products that are socially responsible. They also have extrinsic social comparison preferences that are based on their meetings with others in social interactions. The frequency of these meetings are endogenous to the consumption choices of consumers. A consumer enjoys a social comparison benefit if her consumption decision is more socially responsible than the consumer that she meets in a social interaction and a social comparison cost if it is less socially responsible.The analysis reveals a nonmonotonic effect of social comparison effects on innovation incentives. When the economic value of a product is relatively small, the incentive to innovate decreases as social comparison effects increase. By contrast, when the economic value of a product is sufficiently large, increases in social comparison effects increase the incentive to innovate. Social comparison benefits and costs have different effects on competition between firms. In particular, social comparison benefits soften price competition, whereas social comparison costs tend to exacerbate price competition. We also identify market conditions where a monopoly invests more or less compared to a firm facing competition.

Preview Provision Under Competition

In certain categories, an important element of competition is the use of previews to signal information to potential consumers about product attributes. For example, the front page of a newspaper provides a preview to potential newspaper buyers before they purchase the product. In this context, a news provider can provide previews that are highly informative about the content of the news product. Conversely, a news provider can utilize a preview that is relatively uninformative. We examine the incentives that firms have to adopt different preview strategies in a context where they do not have complete control of product positioning. Our analysis shows that preview strategy can be a useful source of differentiation. However, when a firm adopts a strategy of providing informative previews, it confers a positive externality on a competitor that utilizes uninformative previews. This reinforces the incentive of the competitor to use uninformative previews and explains why the market landscape in news provision is often characterized by asymmetric competition.

Consumer Favorites and the Design of News

The objective of this paper is to better understand the factors that competitive news providers consider to design or deliver news programmes. The focus is broadcast news where, in any programming time period, a viewer watches or consumes one programme. We assume that each viewer is interested in a limited set of topics and that her utility only comes from the “most interesting” news she observes. The key questions we address are as follows: a Should firms adopt designs that facilitate the delivery of more information in their news programmes? b Does the decision of firms to implement such strategies depend on the complexity of the news programme i.e., the number of news stories covered in the news product? c How do such strategies influence competition? We show that firms may or may not benefit by providing better-designed news. The incentive to do this is strongly affected by the complexity of the news product and the intensity of competition between news providers. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.