Elie Ofek

Manufacturer Benefits from Information Integration with Retail Customers

Information integration efforts between manufacturers and retailers, in the form of information sharing, synchronized replenishment, and collaborative product design and development, have been cited as major means to improve supply chain performance. This paper develops a conceptual framework that relates information-integration initiatives to manufacturer profitability. The framework allows such initiatives to impact inventory management and revenue-enhancing measures that, in turn, increase manufacturer profit margins, or affect profit margins directly. Through an extensive survey in the food and consumer packaged goods industry, we empirically examine this framework. The analysis reveals that the various integration techniques are differentially associated with manufacturer performance. Collaborative planning on replenishment, in the form of vendor-managed inventory (VMI), is directly and positively related to manufacturer margins, while collaboration on new products and services is positively related to intermediate performance measures. Specifically, this latter form of collaboration allows the manufacturer to charge higher wholesale prices and, interestingly, is associated with lower retailer, and consequently manufacturer, stockouts. In contrast, collaboration on the handling of excess and defective retailer inventory (i.e., reverse logistics) results in higher manufacturer stockout levels, on average. Solely sharing information on either inventory levels or customer needs is associated with higher manufacturer performance measures up to a certain point; sharing this information is prevalent among manufacturers that achieve industry-average profitability relative to those that achieve below industry-average profitability. The paper explains these results in the context of the conceptual framework developed and discusses the managerial implications for effective coordination between supply chain partners.

Content vs. Advertising: The Impact of Competition on Media Firm Strategy

Media firms compete in two connected markets. They face rivalry for the sale of content to consumers, and at the same time, they compete for advertisers seeking access to the attention of these consumers. We explore the implications of such two-sided competition on the actions and source of profits of media firms. One main conclusion we reach is that media firms may charge higher content prices in a duopoly than in a monopoly. This happens because competition for advertisers can reduce the return per customer impression from the ad market, making each firm less willing to underprice content to increase demand. Greater competitive intensity may thus increase content profits and decrease ad profits. These findings are in sharp contrast to those in a regular one-sided product market, in which competition typically lowers product prices and profits. We extend the framework to examine competition across different media (e.g., between magazines and cable TV) and show that firms in a duopolistic medium may benefit from more intense competition from a monopolist in another medium. We characterize the conditions for each firm in the duopoly medium to bundle more ads and earn greater total profits than the rival firm in the monopoly medium.

The Impact of Add-On Features on Consumer Product Evaluations

The research presented in this article provides evidence that add-on features sold to enhance a product can be more than just discretionary benefits. We argue that consumers draw inferences from the mere availability of add-ons, which in turn lead to significant changes in the perceived utility of the base good itself. Specifically, we propose that the improvements supplied by add-ons can be classified as either alignable or nonalignable and that they have opposing effects on evaluation. A set of four experiments with different product categories confirms this prediction. In addition, we show that the amount of product information available to consumers and expectations about product composition play important moderating roles. From a practical standpoint, these results highlight the need for firms to be mindful of the behavioral implications of making add-ons readily available in the marketplace.

To Innovate or Imitate? Entry Strategy and the Role of Market Research

A firm planning market entry can attempt to develop a product that is either similar to the incumbents existing offering (imitation) or entirely novel (innovation). The authors establish that when the incumbent is more aggressive in research and development (R&D), this negatively affects the entrants marginal return on R&D. Thus, if greater profits produce a strong (weak) desire for the incumbent to increase its R&D level, the entrant will respond by sharply decreasing (increasing) its R&D level. As a result, the incumbents likelihood of retaining the lead position will exhibit an inverse U-shaped pattern as a function of monopoly and duopoly profits. The authors then examine the impact of uncertainty about the rewards from new products and allow firms to conduct market research to resolve the uncertainty. They characterize the conditions for the entrants innovation versus imitation decision to reveal information about future rewards to the incumbent. When duopoly profits are uncertain and can be either high (upside potential) or low (downside potential), the entry strategy will be revealing if the upside potential is attractive enough relative to monopoly profits. In contrast, when innovation has uncertain commercial potential (i.e., either valued or not valued by consumers), the entry strategy will be revealing if duopoly profits are unattractive relative to monopoly profits. In these cases, the entrants innovation–imitation decision is driven by market research; this allows the incumbent to forgo market research and infer the true state of demand from the type of entry strategy it observes.

Achievement motivation, strategic orientations and business performance in entrepreneurial firms How different are Japanese and American founders?

Purpose – There is a lack of research on the link between the personal disposition of an entrepreneurial firms founder, the firms strategic orientation and its performance outcomes. Also, there is a lack of cross‐national research on entrepreneurial firms’ strategic orientations. This paper seeks to address these gaps by exploring the differences in strategic orientation choices and their performance outcomes for American and Japanese entrepreneurial firms, focusing on founders’ achievement motivation as a key personal disposition.Design/methodology/approach – A survey was conducted among 397 Japanese founders and 189 American ones.Findings – This papers key counterintuitive finding is that Japanese and American founders of entrepreneurial firms are more similar than is often suggested. The paper first finds that in both Japan and the US, achievement motivation is positively related to customer orientation and cost orientation while not being related to technological orientation. Second, it is found th...

Product Positioning in a Two-Dimensional Vertical Differentiation Model: The Role of Quality Costs

We study a duopoly model where consumers are heterogeneous with respect to their willingness to pay for two product characteristics and marginal costs are increasing with the quality level chosen on each attribute. We show that although firms seek to manage competition through product positioning, their differentiation strategies critically depend on how costly it is to provide higher quality. When the cost of providing quality is not too high, firms use only one attribute to differentiate their products: they maximally differentiate on one dimension and minimally differentiate on the other (a Max-Min equilibrium). Furthermore, they always differentiate along the dimension with the greater attribute range. As for the dimension with the smaller range and along which they agglomerate, firms either choose the highest quality level or the lowest quality level possible, depending on whether the marginal costs of quality provision are low or intermediate, respectively. However, for larger quality provision costs, firms exploit both dimensions to differentiate their products. In particular, we characterize a maximal differentiation equilibrium in which one firm chooses the highest quality level on both attributes while its rival offers the lowest quality level on both attributes (a Max-Max equilibrium). We discuss the managerial implications of our findings and explain how they enrich and qualify previous results reported in the literature on two-dimensional differentiation models.

The Impact of Prior Decisions on Subsequent Valuations in a Costly Contemplation Model

This paper develops and tests a model of how recall of information from past decisions affects subsequent related decisions. A boundedly rational individual has to determine her willingness to pay for a good that she previously considered purchasing at a given price, or provide valuations for a set of goods that she previously ranked in order of preference. The individual is ex ante uncertain about her utility from consumption of the goods and can exert costly cognitive effort to reduce this uncertainty. We show that incorporating information from a prior decision has three primary effects: (a) Valuations are expected to exhibit higher variance---in particular, the spread of valuations between the most and least preferred alternatives increases; (b) decision makers will, in expectation, exert more effort during the valuation phase; and (c) the relative impact of prior decisions on valuation spread increases, the more each attribute contributes to overall utility. The model predictions are then tested in a series of controlled lab experiments.

Innovation Strategy and Entry Deterrence

We model an incumbent’s decision to pursue radical or incremental innovation when facing a rival entrant. The radical innovation may yield lucrative financial returns but entails significant technological and market‐related uncertainties. It is also particularly attractive to the rival entrant: if the market for it pans out, such an innovation obsoletes the existing technology and any incremental improvements to it. Each firm has its own assessment of the market potential for the radical innovation, and the reliability of these market forecasts can differ. We show that when the entrant’s market‐assessment capability is weak, the incumbent will pursue incremental innovation and postpone its plans to develop radical innovation even when it thinks highly of the market potential for the radical innovation. The incumbent does so to avoid validating the high market potential to the entrant, who may otherwise be encouraged to invest aggressively. The incumbent thus prefers to look “soft” with respect to its innovation strategy in order to discourage entry. Even if its innovation strategy is not observable, we show that an incumbent that assesses the commercial potential for a radical innovation favorably may pursue an incremental path and communicate its plans publicly; this strategy serves to reduce entry by affecting the entrant’s beliefs about the market potential of the innovation. Finally, we extend the model to investigate the entrant’s decision to communicate its innovation intentions. We find that the entrant communicates its plans to aggressively pursue radical innovation only if the incumbent’s market‐assessment capabilities are strong. In doing so, the entrant acts preemptively to discourage the incumbent from pursuing the radical innovation, and is less concerned with validating market potential.

Complementary Goods: Creating, Capturing, and Competing for Value

This paper studies the strategic interaction between firms producing strictly complementary products. With strict complements, a consumer derives positive utility only when both products are used together. We show that value-capture and value-creation problems arise when such products are developed and sold by separate firms “nonintegrated” producers. Although the firms tend to price higher for given quality levels, their provision of quality is so low that, in equilibrium, prices are set well below what an integrated monopolist would choose. When one firm can mandate a royalty fee from the complementor producer as often occurs in arrangements between hardware and software makers, we find that the value-capture problem is mitigated to some extent and consumer surplus rises. However, because royalty fees greatly reduce the incentives of the firm paying them to invest in quality, the arrangement exacerbates the value-creation problem and leads to even lower total quality. Surprisingly, this result can reverse with competition. Specifically, when the firm charging the royalty fee faces a vertically differentiated competitor, the value-creation problem is greatly reduced---opening the door for the possibility of a Pareto-improving outcome in which all firms and consumers benefit. It is worth noting that this outcome cannot be achieved by giving firms the option of introducing a line of product variants; competition serves as a necessary “commitment” ingredient.

Match Your Own Price? Self-Matching as a Retailer’s Multichannel Pricing Strategy

Multichannel retailing has created several new strategic choices for retailers. With respect to pricing, an important decision is whether to offer a “self-matching policy,” which allows a multichannel retailer to offer the lowest of its online and store prices to consumers. In practice, we observe considerable heterogeneity in self-matching policies: There are retailers who offer to self-match and retailers who explicitly state that they will not match prices across channels. Using a game-theoretic model, we investigate the strategic forces behind the adoption (or non-adoption) of self-matching across a range of competitive scenarios, including a monopolist, two competing multichannel retailers, as well as a mixed duopoly. Though self-matching can negatively impact a retailer when consumers pay the lower price, we uncover two novel mechanisms that can make self-matching profitable in a duopoly setting. Specifically, self-matching can dampen competition online and enable price discrimination in-store. Its ...