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Author: Jos Jansen Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Competitive pressure is lower in markets where goods are more differentiated. I analyze how a change in the degree of horizontal product differentiation affects the incentives of duopolists to disclose quality information. If disclosure is costly, then a firm discloses high qualities but conceals low qualities in equilibrium. The higher the disclosure cost, the higher the equilibrium threshold below which firms conceal quality information. I show that the effect of product differentiation on quality disclosure depends on the cost of disclosure. For low (high) disclosure costs, a firm discloses more (respectively, less) quality information if goods become more differentiated.
Author: Jos Jansen Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Competitive pressure is lower in markets where goods are more differentiated. I analyze how a change in the degree of horizontal product differentiation affects the incentives of duopolists to disclose quality information. If disclosure is costly, then a firm discloses high qualities but conceals low qualities in equilibrium. The higher the disclosure cost, the higher the equilibrium threshold below which firms conceal quality information. I show that the effect of product differentiation on quality disclosure depends on the cost of disclosure. For low (high) disclosure costs, a firm discloses more (respectively, less) quality information if goods become more differentiated.
Author: Dan Levin Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
We analyze costly quality disclosure with horizontally differentiated products under duopoly and a cartel, and characterize the effect of competition on disclosure and welfare. We show that expected disclosure is higher under a cartel than under duopoly, and the welfare comparison depends on the level of disclosure cost: when the disclosure cost is low, welfare is higher under a cartel than duopoly, but when the disclosure cost is high, welfare is higher under duopoly. In either market structure, disclosure is excessive in terms of total surplus, but insufficient in terms of consumer surplus.
Author: Yeolyong Sung Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
We study firms' voluntary disclosure in an oligopoly market for vertically differentiated products, where firms are allowed to advertise a rival's product as well as their own products. When consumers are uncertain of product qualities, Board (2009)1) and Hotz and Xiao (2011)2) show that price competition among firms alleviates firms' incentives to disclose the quality of their own product. Nonetheless, firms still have incentives to distinguish their own products from those of the competitors to attract more consumers. A comparative advertisement is a useful way to distinguish products and thus, a rival's advertisement can lead to a disclosure of a firm's product information. Comparative or negative advertisements are used in many industries and political campaigns. In 2010, for example in the United States, Verizon Wireless compared their service coverage with that of the competitor, AT&T, on the TV commercial and their Web site in order to advertise the 3G network service for mobile phones (See Figure 1). They had a broader service area than AT&T did and used a comparative advertisement to show that their service was superior.3) Through the negative advertisement by Verizon Wireless on the AT&T's service, the information on the AT&T's mobile phone service was revealed even though AT&T did not disclose their nation-wide service coverage in a picture. This is in contrast with the fact that AT&T themselves put the map showing their nation-wide 3G service coverage for iPads on their Web site.4) At that time AT&T was the only service provider for iPads. This paper allows firms to advertise a rival's product. We show that the qualities of all the products in an industry are fully revealed by a high quality firm's comparative advertisement and full revelation is the unique equilibrium outcome. Each firm's advertisement (message) can convey information on either its own product quality or a rival's or both. Differentiating from traditional models that consider advertisement as a signal of product qualities (Nelson, 19745); Schmalensee, 19786); Grossman and Shapiro, 19847); Kihlstrom and Riordan, 19848)), we consider it as a truthful claim about its qualities. In other words, we see the role of advertisement as conveying factual information directly to the consumers. The restriction of firms' messages to truthful claims can be justified by the argument that an untruthful claim, such as an overstatement on their own product or an understatement on their rival's product, could be challenged in a court of law. If the claim was found to be untruthful, the firm that sent the untrue message might have to pay a fine or more, and the true quality would be revealed as the result. In this model, full revelation occurs as the unique equilibrium outcome. If firms do not disclose any information and consumers do not distinguish the qualities among products, then the firms' profits are zero by price competition. By revealing some information and having consumers perceive that the product is differentiated from its rivals', a firm can increase the profit. In the competition between two firms, there exists an equilibrium in which full information on all products is revealed by the firm with a higher quality (henceforth, called a high quality firm) as in the above example of the mobile phone service industry. The high quality firm can increase the profit by advertising the rival's low quality product as negatively as possible because such an advertisement increases its demand by making more consumers switch from the low quality product to the high quality product. Since false claims are not allowed, the negative advertisements reveal the true quality of the rival's product. Meanwhile, the high quality firm reveals the true quality of its own product building grounds for a higher price. Since an advertisement that fully reveals both firms' product qualities is a dominant strategy for the high quality firm, full revelation is the unique outcome. In general, full revelation fails without advertisement on a rival's product. Such revelation, as many studies suggest, increases consumers' welfare, and thus the literature argues in favor of the introduction of mandatory disclosure laws (Fishman and Hagerty, 20039); Board, 2009; Hotz and Xiao, 2011). However, mandatory disclosure laws burden both private and public sectors with an enforcement cost and a deadweight loss. As an alternative to the costly legal solution, the results of this paper suggest that a market can lead to a full revelation with voluntary disclosure if negative advertisement on rivals' products is allowed. As a parallel example, in the domain of politics, negative advertisement exists in the form of negative campaigning. Amid ongoing debate and controversy, recent studies such as Polborn and Yi (2006)10) defend prevailing negative campaigning arguing that consequently revealed information on the candidates empowers the electorate to make more-informed decisions. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. After reviewing the related literature in Section 2, we present an oligopoly model with price competition between two firms in Section 3 and derive the firms' profit functions from the equilibrium pricing rules and the associated demand functions in Section 4. With the profit functions, in Section 5, we analyze the firms' advertisement strategies and show that there exists an equilibrium in which full information is revealed by the high quality firm. Section 6 concludes the findings and discusses extendible issues.
Author: Oliver J. Board Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
There are many laws that require sellers to disclose private information about the quality of their products. But the theoretical justification for these laws is not obvious: economic theory predicts that a seller will voluntarily disclose such quality information, however unfavorable, as long as it is costless to do so. Here we show that competitive pressures between firms can undermine this full disclosure result, and explain why it may be the case that only high-quality firms choose to disclose. In this setting, mandatory disclosure laws can promote competition and raise consumer surplus at the expense of firm profits, potentially increasing the efficiency of the market.
Author: Li, Xi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This study examines how firms' voluntary disclosure decisions are influenced by product market competition. Using separate measures to capture different dimensions of competition, I show that competition from potential entrants increases disclosure quantity while competition from existing rivals decreases disclosure quantity. I also find that competition enhances disclosure quality mainly through reducing the optimism in profit forecasts and reducing the pessimism in investment forecasts. Moreover, I find that the above association is less pronounced for industry leaders, consistent with industry leaders facing less competitive pressures than industry followers.
Author: Liang Guo Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 28
Book Description
Marketers disclose quality information directly to potential consumers using a variety of communication channels. This study investigates how competition may influence duopoly firms' incentive to voluntarily and truthfully reveal quality information. It is shown that firms in competitive markets reveal less information than a monopoly firm does. In addition, sequential disclosure leads to asymmetric equilibrium disclosure behavior: The disclosure leader discloses unambiguously less information than that in the simultaneous disclosure case, whereas the disclosure follower ex ante reveals less (more) private information than both the disclosure leader and that in the simultaneous disclosure case when the disclosure cost is sufficiently low (high). We also examine the firms' equilibrium ex-ante profits and social welfare. It is demonstrated that there may exist a U-shaped relationship between equilibrium monopoly profits (or social welfare under both monopoly and duopoly) and the disclosure cost. Moreover, in comparison to the simultaneous disclosure case, sequential disclosure can lead to increasingly softened competition, improving both firm profitability and social welfare.
Author: Jianqiang Zhang Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Consumers experience a sense of loss when a product's quality does not match their expectations. To alleviate consumer loss aversion (CLA), firms can disclose information to reduce consumers' uncertainty about product quality and the resulting psychological loss. In this paper, we investigate the implications of CLA on firm profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare when firms endogenously make quality disclosure decisions. We find that CLA leads symmetric firms to disclose quality more often. Given that CLA weakly reduces consumers' utility from buying a product and quality disclosure is costly, intuition suggests that CLA is detrimental to firms. We find that this intuition is only true in a monopoly. Surprisingly, CLA makes both firms in a competition better off. These effects are unique to CLA, while related emotion such as anticipated regret does not affect disclosure decisions or firm profits. Moreover, CLA increases firms' profit when they invest in quality disclosure instead of money-back guarantees to respond to CLA. We also find that CLA decreases consumer surplus and social welfare. Therefore, educating consumers to improve decision-making skills by deliberating on future outcomes and emotions can benefit firms at the cost of consumers and society. When firms disclose quality sequentially, CLA can discourage the follower from disclosing quality. A strong level of CLA increases the leader's profit over the follower's, thereby encouraging firms to be the first mover in quality disclosure.
Author: Jos Jansen
Author: Jos Jansen
Author: Dan Levin
Author: Yeolyong Sung
Author: Jos Jansen
Author: Oliver J. Board
Author: Zhe Jin
Author: Li, Xi
Author: Liang Guo
Author: Jianqiang Zhang
Author: Annika Herr