Herding Behaviour and the Size of Customer Base as a Commitment to Quality

Chong Ju Choi, Xeni Dassiou () and Stephen Gettings

Economica, 2000, vol. 67, issue 267, pages 375-98

Abstract: This paper refers to herding behaviour as developed in Bikhchandani et al. (1992), Bannerjee (1992) and Choi and Scarpa (1994). We examine the behaviour of a potential customer who does not know how many of her predecessors decided not to purchase the product. We show that, ceteris paribus, a smaller (larger) customer base increases the likelihood of a positive (negative) cascade. Hence, a firm can signal its commitment to high quality (Schelling 1960) by choosing to develop a customer base that relies upon the customer's "private" information rather than one that relies on an informational cascade. Copyright 2000 by The London School of Economics and Political Science

Date: 2000

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/servlet/useragent ... =267&year=&part=null link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:econom:v:67:y:2000:i:267:p:375-98

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0427

Access Statistics for this article

Economica is edited by Frank Cowell, Tore Ellingsen and Alan Manning

More articles in Economica from London School of Economics and Political Science
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().