Competitive Entry of Information Goods Under Quality Uncertainty

Zan Zhang (), Guofang Nan (), Minqiang Li () and Yong Tan ()
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Zan Zhang: School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Guofang Nan: College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
Minqiang Li: College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
Yong Tan: Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195

Management Science, 2022, vol. 68, issue 4, 2869-2888

Abstract: When confronted with a new product, consumers often find it difficult to predict how it will perform, and such uncertainty reduces consumers’ willingness to adopt the product. In this paper, we consider a market whereby consumers decide when and which product to buy, given that they know the product quality of the incumbent but are uncertain about that of the entrant. We investigate how consumer uncertainty about product quality affects firms’ behavior-based pricing and customer acquisition and retention dynamics. Using a two-period vertical model, we find that, under high-end encroachment, an increase in consumer uncertainty reduces the entrant’s profit and hurts the incumbent’s profit when the quality differential between the products is relatively small, whereas, under low-end encroachment, increasing uncertainty not only benefits the incumbent but also can favor the entrant. An important implication for entrants is that the marketing activities, which aim to reduce consumer uncertainty about product functionalities, may fail to improve profitability. We also find that the entrant lowers the price for uninformed customers and raises the price for repeat buyers under high-end encroachment but lowers the price for all customers under low-end encroachment. We further examine the subsidy strategy and show that, when the entrant’s product has a significant quality advantage and consumer uncertainty is high but not very high, the optimal strategy for the entrant is to acquire all consumers who do not buy from the incumbent by providing subsidies and to drop the low-valuation customers by means of a high price after their uncertainty is resolved.

Keywords: competitive strategy; product uncertainty; vertical differentiation; behavior-based pricing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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