Issue 3

Volume 1 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
September 1992

Exclusivity Clauses and Best Price Policies in Input Markets

Patrick DeGraba and Andrew Postlewaite
We would like to thank Franklin Allen, Thomas Cooper, Dave Crawford, Paul Milgrom, and Almarin Phillips and several anonymous referees, including two from this journal, for their helpful comments. Responsibility for any remaining errors rests with the authors. Support for this research from the National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.

A Model of Search and Shopping by Homogeneous Customers Without Price Precommitment by Firms

Andrew F. Daughety
Price setting by firms and search by customers is analyzed, relaxing two basic attributes of most search models: price precommitment and agent heterogeneity. Customers are characterized by individual demand functions for a homogeneous good and can choose to employ a threat to search. Firms noncooperatively make pricing decisions by using the individual demand curves under conditions of constant marginal cost. Firms adopt pricing rules that optimally respond to customer search histories. Bargaining power is endogenously assigned. Firms know their common marginal cost; customers, the cost distribution. The unique separating equilibrium is characterized by a lumpy distribution of prices and by heterogeneous shopping behavior by customers giving rise to “shoppers” and “nonshoppers”

Restoring the Principle of Minimum Differentiation in Product Positioning

Byong-Duk Rhee, André de Palma, Claes Fornell and Jacques-François Thisse
Most research on product positioning supports the idea of differentiation. Product standardization (i.e., minimum differentiation) occurs only under very limiting assumptions. Yet, similar products are often observed in the marketplace. We attempt to restore the case for standardization by using more realistic assumptions than in previous work. We assume that consumers consider not only observable attributes in brand choice, but also attributes that are unobservable by the firms. We find that standardization is an equilibrium when consumers exhibit sufficient heterogeneity along the unobservable attributes under both positioning with exogenously given prices and price competition, We also show that, under insufficient heterogeneity along the unobservable attribute, our results coincide with past research that argues in favor of differentiation.

Regulation by Duopoly

Emmanuelle Auriol and Jean-Jacques Laffont
This paper analyzes, within the framework of the new regulatory economics that emphasizes asymmetries of information, the optimal structure of an industry. The duplication of fixed costs incurred in a duopoly structure may be socially justified in a static model by three effects: the sampling effect, the yardstick competition effect, and the increasing marginal cost effect. We show that in general, asymmetric information favors duopoly when the market structure is decided before firms discovers their cost characteristics (a common situation in dual sourcing for procurement), and favors monopoly when the market structure is decided after firms discover their cost characteristics (the case of split-award auctions).

Economic Analysis and Management Strategy: A Survey

Daniel F. Spulber
The survey classifies economic theories of the firm into four categories based on the level of aggregation in economic models: (1) neoclassical, (2) industrial organization, (3) contractual, and (4) organizational incentive. Economic theories of the firm are evaluated on the basis of their potential application to problems of management decision making. The survey suggests that a management perspective can be useful in developing an integrated theoretical analysis of the firm that addresses both competitive strategy and organizational design.

A Review of Ghemawat’s Commitment: The Dynamic of Strategy

Margaret A. Peteraf
Ghemawat's Commitment makes recent results in game-theoretic industrial organization accessible and useful to practitioners in the field of strategic management. This book contributes to the management strategy literature on two levels. On a conceptual level, Ghemawat strives to isolate “commitment” as the sole explanation of persistent differences in firm performance. On a more pragmatic level, he provides a framework intended to aid managers in making commitment-intensive decisions. It is with respect to how well he achieves these two distinct goals that I evaluate Ghemawat's contribution. In addition, I review briefly the book's content, and I compare Ghemawat's approach to some alternative approaches familiar to scholars and practitioners of strategic management.