Some Patterns of Market Shares of Brands Within and Across Product Categories

Rajeev Kohli and Raaj Sah ()

No 604, Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Abstract: This paper: (i) reports an empirical regularity in the market shares of brands; (ii) presents a theoretical framework for understanding the observed regularity; (iii) adduces additional empirical consequences of the framework, which are some counterintuitive relationships among market shares of brands across different product categories; and (iv) presents empirical evidence for these consequences, thus providing additional support for the theoretical framework. Our cross-sectional data on market shares consists of 1171 brands in 91 product categories of foods and sporting goods sold in the US. The key empirical regularity is that, in each category, the decrease in the market share between two successively ranked brands becomes smaller as one progresses from higher-ranked to lower-ranked brands. The power law represents these patterns well, in an absolute sense, and better than an alternative model, namely, the exponential form, which has been studied in the literature but without having been compared to any alternative. The latter form predicts that the ratio of the market shares of any two successively ranked brands is a constant. We present some potential implications of our findings. We also offer an interpretation of the previously known square-root relationship between market share and the order of entry of firms into an industry. The theoretical framework that we present for understanding the patterns reported here shares its foundation with that of the familiar Dirichlet-multinomial paradigm of brand purchases. This framework has some intuitive interpretations; it accommodates multiple product categories; and it allows for the entry and exit of brands over time.

Keywords: market; shares (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/about/publication ... ers/pdf/wp_06_04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Some Patterns of Market Shares of Brands Within and Across Product Categories (2005)
Working Paper: Market Shares: Some Power Law Results and Observations (2004)
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:har:wpaper:0604

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eleanor Cartelli ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).