Product Assortment and Price Competition under Multinomial Logit Demand

Omar Besbes and Denis Sauré

Production and Operations Management, 2016, vol. 25, issue 1, 114-127

Abstract: type="main" xml:id="poms12402-abs-0001">

The role of assortment planning and pricing in shaping sales and profits of retailers is well documented and studied in monopolistic settings. However, such a role remains relatively unexplored in competitive environments. In this study, we study equilibrium behavior of competing retailers in two settings: (i) when prices are exogenously fixed, and retailers compete in assortments only; and (ii) when retailers compete jointly in assortment and prices. For this, we model consumer choice using a multinomial Logit, and assume that each retailer selects products from a predefined set, and faces a display constraint. We show that when the sets of products available to retailers do not overlap, there always exists one equilibrium that Pareto-dominates all others, and that such an outcome can be reached through an iterative process of best responses. A direct corollary of our results is that competition leads a firm to offer a broader set of products compared to when it is operating as a monopolist, and to broader offerings in the market compared to a centralized planner. When some products are available to all retailers, that is, assortments might overlap, we show that display constraints drive equilibrium existence properties.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/poms.2016.25.issue-1 (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:popmgt:v:25:y:2016:i:1:p:114-127

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1111/(ISSN)1937-5956

Access Statistics for this article

Production and Operations Management is currently edited by Kalyan Singhal

More articles in Production and Operations Management from Production and Operations Management Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().