Retail Channel Management in Consumer Search Markets

Daniel Garcia and Maarten Janssen

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We study how a monopoly manufacturer optimally manages her contractual relations with retailers in markets with consumer search. By choosing wholesale prices, the manufacturer affects the degree of competition between retailers and the incentives of consumers to search. We show that depending on whether or not the manufacturer can commit to her price decisions and on the search cost, the manufacturer may be substantially better off choosing her wholesale prices not independent of each other, consciously allowing for asymmetric contracts. Thus, our analysis may shed light on when we may expect sales across different retailers to be positively or negatively correlated. Our model may be able to generate loss leaders at the wholesale level and show the rationale for creating ”premium resellers”.

Keywords: Consumer Search; Retailing; Pricing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 L13 M30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-10-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-com, nep-cta, nep-mic and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/74394/1/MPRA_paper_74394.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Retail channel management in consumer search markets (2018)
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:pra:mprapa:74394

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().