COMPETITIVE PRICING BY A PRICE LEADER

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: ROY, A; HANSSENS, DM; RAJU, JS
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; University of Pennsylvania
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.40.7.809
• 发表日期: 1994
• 页码: 809-823
• 关键词: Marketing; competitive strategy; pricing; games; noncooperative; Sequential

摘要

We examine the problem of pricing in a market where one brand acts as a price leader. We develop a procedure to estimate a leader's price rule, which is optimal given a sales target objective, and allows for the inclusion of demand forecasts. We illustrate our estimation procedure by calibrating this optimal price rule for both the leader and the follower using data on past sales and prices from the mid-size sedan segment of the U.S. automobile market. Our results suggest that a leader-follower system (Stackelberg) seems more consistent with the pricing behavior in this market, than a mutually independent pricing rule (Nash). We also find that our optimal price rule explains this market data better than other pricing schemes that do not account for optimizing behavior on the part of the leader and the follower.