modeling global spillover of new product takeoff abstract this article examines the global spillover of foreign product introductions and takeoffs on a focal country s time to takeoff using a novel data set of penetration data for eight high tech products across 55 countries it shows how foreign clout the susceptibility to foreign influences and intercountry distances affect global spillover patterns the authors find that foreign takeoffs but not foreign introductions accelerate a focal country s time to takeoff the larger the country the higher its economic wealth and the more it exports the more clout it has in the global spillover process in contrast the poorer the country the more tourists it receives and the higher its population density the more susceptible it is to global spillover effects cross country spillover effects are stronger the closer the countries are to one another both geographically and economically but not necessarily in terms of culture the model the authors develop also quantifies the spillover between each co

household electricity demand revisited respond to price changes this paper develops a model for evaluating the effects of alternative tariff designs on electricity use the model concurrently addresses several interrelated difficulties posed by nonlinear pricing heterogeneity in consumer price sensitivity and consumption aggregation over appliances and time we estimate the model using extensive data for a representative sample of 1300 california households the results imply a strikingly skewed distribution of household electricity price elasticities in the population with a small fraction of households accounting for most aggregate demand response we then estimate the aggregate and distributional consequences of recent tariff structure changes recent efforts to restructure electricity markets have renewed interest in electricity demand and pricing this interest reflects a broad desire to improve the efficiency of electricity markets and policy makers concerns over the impact of price changes on consumers how new pricing mechanisms would affect households consumption and expenditures is a matter of considerable uncertainty however this uncertainty has provoked controversy and debate in the regulatory policy arena hampering market reforms using econometric methods to assess the effects of electricity price changes presents several challenges these include the nonlinear structure of tariff schedules aggregation of metered consumption behaviour over time and appliances and the interdependence of energy use with longer term household decisions over appliance ownership and dwelling characteristics the first two issues introduce complex simultaneity problems between marginal prices and consumption the third issue imposes high data requirements information on household specific appliance holdings and residence features and creates heterogeneity in consumption responses related to the characteristics of these durable goods when the researcher s objective is to develop a model for simulating the effects of prospective tariff changes ignoring these issues will provide an incomplete assessment of demand responses and potentially misleading predictions of a new tariff s consumption and revenue consequences in this paper we estimate a model of household electricity demand that can be used

distributional effects of a carbon tax on car fuels in france this paper analyses the distributional effects of alternative scenarios of carbon taxes on car fuels using disaggregated french panel data from 2003 to 2006 it incorporates household price responsiveness that differs across income groups into a consumer surplus measure of tax burden carbon taxation is regressive before revenue recycling however taking into account the benefits from congestion reduction induced by the tax mitigates regressivity we show also that recycling additional revenues from the carbon tax either in equal amounts to each household or according to household size makes poorest households better off

do doctors practice defensive medicine defensive medicine is a potentially serious social problem if fear of liability drives health care providers to administer treatments that do not have worthwhile medical benefits then the current liability system may generate inefficiencies much larger than the costs of compensating malpractice claimants to obtain direct empirical evidence on this question we analyze the effects of malpractice liability reforms using data on all elderly medicare beneficiaries treated for serious heart disease in 1984 1987 and 1990 we find that malpractice reforms that directly reduce provider liability pressure lead to reductions of 5 to 9 percent in medical expenditures without substantial effects on mortality or medical complications we conclude that liability reforms can reduce defensive medical practices

the market evolution and sales takeoff of product innovations in contrast to the prevailing supply side explanation that price decreases are the key driver of a sales takeoff we argue that outward shifting supplyand demand curves lead to market takeoff our fundamental idea is that sales in new markets are initially low because the first commercialized forms of new innovations are primitive then as new firms enter actual and perceived product quality improves and prices possibly drop which leads to a takeoff in sales to provide empirical evidence for this explanation we explore the relationship between takeoff times price decreases and firm entry for a sample of consumer and industrial product innovations commercialized in the united states over the past 150 years based on a proportional hazards analysis of takeoff times we find that new firm entry dominates other factors in explaining observed sales takeoff times we interpret these results as supporting the idea that demand shifts during the early evolution of a new market due to nonprice factors is the key driver of a sales takeoff

the induced innovation hypothesis and energy saving technological change we develop a methodology for testing hicks s induced innovation hypothesis by estimating a product characteristics model of energy using consumer durables augmenting the hypothesis to allow for the ine uence of government regulations for the products we explored the evidence suggests that i the rate of overall innovation was independent of energy prices and regulations ii the direction of innovation was responsive to energy price changes for some products but not for others iii energy price changes induced changes in the subset of technically feasible models that were offered for sale iv this responsiveness increased substantially during the period after energy efficiency product labeling was required and v nonetheless a sizable portion of efficiency improvements were autonomous

advertising learning and consumer choice in experience good markets an empirical examination this article empirically analyzes different effects of advertising in a nondurable experience good market a dynamic learning model of consumer behavior is presented in which i allow both informative effects of advertising and prestige or image effects of advertising this learning model is estimated using consumer level panel data tracking grocery purchases and advertising exposures over time empirical results suggest that in this market advertising s primary effect was that of informing consumers the estimates are used to quantify the value of this information to consumers and evaluate the welfare implications of an alternative advertising regulatory regime

a percolation based model explaining delayed takeoff in new product diffusion a model of new product diffusion is proposed in which a site percolation dynamics represents socially driven diffusion of knowledge about the product s characteristics in a population of consumers a consumer buys the new product if her valuation of it formed after her witnessing the product in use among her friends or neighbors is not below the price of the product announced in a given period our model attributes the empirical finding of a delayed takeoff of a new product to a drift of the percolation dynamics from a nonpercolating regime to a percolating regime this drift is caused by learning effects lowering the price of the product or by network effects increasing its individual valuations by consumers both with an increasing number of buyers

a probabilistic choice model for market segmentation and elasticity structure marketing scholars commonly characterize market structure by studying the patterns of substitution implied by brand switching though the approach is useful it typically ignores the destabilizing

technology shocks technological collaboration and innovation outcomes in the early to mid 1990s technology alliances suddenly surged to unprecedented levels roughly 300 growth per year from 1990 to 1995 and then declined just as precipitously this massive increase in alliance activity caused the crystallization of a giant component in the global technology network that connected a large portion of the world s firms government labs universities and other organizations however when alliance activity declined the component disintegrated what caused this spike in alliance activity and did this large but transient change in collaboration activity leave any enduring effect the data here suggest that a major technology shock may have provoked this alliance surge a technology shock may simultaneously unleash significant innovation opportunities while creating great uncertainty in the economic environment though it is well known that firms often use alliances both to respond to uncertainty and facilitate innovation little is known about how technology shocks affect the collaboration behavior of firms and how these two factors separately influence innovation outcomes i integrate an inductive study of collaboration activity and a technology shock with existing research on economics alliances and networks to build a set of arguments about how technology shocks will influence alliance behavior how changes in alliance behavior will influence the global technology collaboration network and about how each of these changes is likely to influence the innovative outcomes of firms i then explore the separate and joint effects of the technology shock and collaboration activity on innovation using a large sample panel study of patenting by north american firms

effects of brand preference product attributes and marketing mix variables in technology product markets we develop a demand model for technology products that captures the effect of changes in the portfolio of models offered by a brand as well as the influence of the dynamics in its intrinsic preference on that brand s performance to account for the potential correlation in the preferences of models offered by a particular brand we use a nested logit model with the brand e g sony at the upper level and its various models e g mavica fd dsc etc at the lower level of the nest relative model preferences are captured via their attributes and prices we allow for heterogeneity across consumers in their preferences for these attributes and in their price sensitivities in addition to heterogeneity in consumers intrinsic brand preferences together with the nested logit assumption this allows for a flexible substitution pattern across models at the aggregate level the attractiveness of a brand s product line changes over time with entry and exit of new models and with changes in attribute and price levels to allow for time varying intrinsic brand preferences we use a state space model based on the kalman filter which captures the influence of marketing actions such as brand level advertising on the dynamics of intrinsic brand preferences hence the proposed model accounts for the effects of brand preferences model attributes and marketing mix variables on consumer choice first we carry out a simulation study to ensure that our estimation procedure is able to recover the true parameters generating the data then we estimate our model parameters on data for the u s digital camera market overall we find that the effect of dynamics in the intrinsic brand preference is greater than the corresponding effect of the dynamics in the brand s product line attractiveness assuming plausible profit margins we evaluate the effect of increasing the advertising expenditures for the largest and the smallest brands in this category and find that these brands can increase their profitability by increasing their advertising expenditures we also analyze the impact of modifying a camera model s attributes on its profits such an analysis could potentially be used to evaluate if product development efforts would be profitable

clearing the air the costs and consequences of higher cafe standards and increased gasoline taxes abstract concerns about energy security and climate change have sparked legislators interest in reducing gasoline consumption by increasing corporate average fuel economy cafe standards using an empirically rich simulation model and cost estimates for anticipated fuel economy technologies we estimate annual costs of reducing long run gasoline consumption by 10 via a 3 8 miles per gallon increase in the standards and the potential cost savings from allowing manufacturers to buy and sell fuel economy credits maximum gasoline savings would be realized only after all existing vehicles were replaced or 14 years in our model a gasoline tax would produce greater immediate savings by encouraging people to drive less and eventually to choose more fuel efficient vehicles we demonstrate the advantage of a tax by comparing the cost of the higher cafe standards over the first 14 years against the cost of a gasoline tax that would save the same amount of gasoline over that time

duopoly and quality standards abstract in the absence of sunk costs a low quality producer benefits from a mildly restrictive quality standard whereas a high quality producer suffers from it consumers welfare increases if the firm producing the higher quality does not increase its quality significantly in response to the increase in quality by its rival a sufficiently severe standard causes exit from the industry when there are no sunk cost the high quality producer exits first

toward a theoretical model of voluntary overcompliance abstract we explain why some firms voluntarily overcomply with environmental regulation in our model all consumers value environmental quality but differ in their willingness to pay which depends on their income levels publicly available information on environmental performance of firms enables consumers to identify clean firms firms participate in a two stage duopoly game where they first choose their levels of cleaning technology and next engage in price competition the market gets segmented by income levels a minimum standard binding on the dirty firm has the effect of improving the performance of the cleaner firm a subsidy obtains the same competitive outcome

optimal tax policy under environmental quality competition this paper studies the socially optimal emission and commodity tax policy when consumers are willing to pay a price premium for environmentally friendlier variants of a commodity vertically differentiated in environmental quality the first best levels of quality can be obtained by a combination of a uniform ad valorem tax and an emission tax or a subsidy for buying green products the first best emission tax is higher than the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality regardless of environmentally conscious consumers if only one instrument is available the second best emission tax is equal to the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality a uniform ad valorem tax increases welfare only if the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality is low enough

mcdonald s and kfc in china competitors or companions in this paper we study the entry and expansion decisions of mcdonald s and kfc in china using an originally assembled data set on the two chains expansion in the china market from their initial entry up to year 2007 we analyze how the presence of a rival affects each firm s strategies the results indicate that a rival s presence has a net positive effect on a chain s expansion decision we focus on testing two possible explanations for a positive rival impact market learning and demand expansion first we derive a set of theoretical predictions on how a chain s optimal expansion decision would react to its rival s expansion patterns when market learning versus demand expansion is the driving force of the rival s positive influence the empirical analysis based on these predictions consistently suggests that market learning is more likely to explain the positive effect of kfc on mcdonald s and that demand expansion is more plausible with mcdonald s positive spillover on kfc in other words the results are consistent with the presence of kfc signaling market demand potential and growth to mcdonald s and the presence of mcdonald s helping to cultivate consumer taste and generate demand for western fast food which benefits kfc

pollution permits and environmental innovation abstract this paper starts with a warning about the negative impact of plain pollution allowance markets on environmental pollution innovation stand alone spot markets enable the government to expropriate an innovation by offering a competing technology pollution permits that puts an arbitrary downward pressure on the licensing price advance allowances reduce expropriation but still create suboptimal incentives for innovation they have the further drawback that permits are inefficiently used when the innovation occurs options to pollute at a given striking price fare better than allowances because they create private incentives to phase out pollution in the case of innovation we characterize the social optimum and show that it can be implemented by issuing options to pollute inter alia finally the paper compares ex ante and ex post government procurement surprisingly ex post licensing by the innovator to the government may yield a higher licensing fee than an ex ante contract

decision making under uncertainty capturing dynamic brand choice processes in turbulent consumer goods markets we construct two models of the behavior of consumers in an environment where there is uncertainty about brand attributes in our models both usage experience and advertising exposure give consumers noisy signals about brand attributes consumers use these signals to update their expectations of brand attributes in a bayesian manner the two models are 1 a dynamic model with immediate utility maximization and 2 a dynamic forward looking model in which consumers maximize the expected present value of utility over a planning horizon given this theoretical framework we derive from the bayesian learning framework how brand choice probabilities depend on past usage experience and advertising exposures we then form likelihood functions for the models and estimate them on nielsen scanner data for detergent we find that the functional forms for experience and advertising effects that we derive from the bayesian learning framework fit the data very well relative to flexible ad hoc functional forms such as exponential smoothing and also perform better at out of sample prediction another finding is that in the context of consumer learning of product attributes although the forward looking model fits the data statistically better at conventional significance levels both models produce similar parameter estimates and policy implications our estimates indicate that consumers are risk averse with respect to variation in brand attributes which discourages them from buying unfamiliar brands using the estimated behavioral models we perform various scenario evaluations to find how changes in marketing strategy affect brand choice both in the short and long run a key finding obtained from the policy experiments is that advertising intensity has only weak short run effects but a strong cumulative effect in the long run the substantive content of the paper is potentially of interest to academics in marketing economics and decision sciences as well as product managers marketing research managers and analysts interested in studying the effectiveness of marketing mix strategies our paper will be of particular interest to those interested in the long run effects of advertising note that our estimation strategy requires us to specify explicit behavioral models of consumer choice behavior derive the implied relationships among choice probabilities past purchases and marketing mix variables and then estimate the behavioral parameters of each model such an estimation strategy is referred to as structural estimation and econometric models that are based explicitly on the consumer s maximization problem and whose parameters are parameters of the consumers utility functions or of their constraints are referred to as structural models a key benefit of the structural approach is its potential usefulness for policy evaluation the parameters of structural models are invariant to policy that is they do not change due to a change in the policy in contrast the parameters of reduced form brand choice models are in general functions of marketing strategy variables e g consumer response to price may depend on pricing policy as a result the predictions of reduced form models for the outcomes of policy experiments may be unreliable because in making the prediction one must assume that the model parameters are unaffected by the policy change since the agents in our models choose among many alternative brands their choice probabilities take the form of higher order integrals we employ monte carlo methods to approximate these integrals and estimate our models using simulated maximum likelihood estimation of the dynamic forward looking model also requires that a dynamic programming problem be solved in order to form the likelihood function for this we use a new approximation method based on simulation and interpolation techniques these estimation techniques may be of interest to researchers and policy makers in many fields where dynamic choice among discrete alternatives is important such as marketing decision sciences labor and health economics and industrial organization

demand heterogeneity and technology evolution implications for product and process innovation the evolution of technology has been a central issue in the strategy and organizations literature however the focus of much of this work has been on what is essentially the supply side of technical change the evolution of firm capabilities we present a demand based view of technology evolution that is focused on the interaction between technology development and the demand environment in which the technology is ultimately evaluated we develop a formal computer simulation model that explicitly considers the influence of heterogeneity in market demand the presence of consumers with different needs and requirements on firms innovation choices the model is used to examine the dynamics of product and process innovation utterback and abernathy 1975 the analysis reveals that demand heterogeneity offers an alternative to supply side explanations of the technology life cycle further by considering the implications of decreasing marginal utility from performance improvements the model highlights the role of technologically satisfied consumers in shaping innovation incentives and suggests a rationale for a new stage in the technology life cycle characterized by increasing performance at a stable price the stage has not yet been treated formally in the literature but is widely observed most prominently in digital and information based technologies

consumption based cross brand learning are private labels really private abstract while some researchers view private labels pls as a key tool for retailer differentiation others imply that consumers do not distinguish between pls of different chains this debate raises the question do a retail chain s pl investments subsidize rival pls in addition how does this affect their choice share vis a vis national brands the authors investigate whether consumers generalize knowledge from product experience across pls of different retail chains and whether such cross brand learning depends on the pl brands link with the chain name or on their quality differences the proposed brand choice model captures cross brand learning through quality perception spillovers consumers adjust beliefs about pl quality on the basis of consumption experience and familiarity spillovers uncertainty about a pl diminishes with rival pl consumption household scanner panel data on dish soap and breakfast cereals yield clear evidence of cross retailer learning among standard pls regardless of the

consumption externalities and diffusion in pharmaceutical markets antiulcer drugs we examine the role of consumption externalities in the demand for pharmaceuticals at both the brand level and over a therapeutic class of drugs externalities emerge when use of a drug by others affects its value and or conveys information about efficacy and safety to patients and physicians this can affect the rate of market diffusion for a new entrant and can lead to dominance of one drug despite the availability of close substitutes we use data for h2 antagonist antiulcer drugs to estimate a dynamic demand model and quantify these effects the model has three components an hedonic price equation that measures how the aggregate usage of a drug as well as conventional attributes affect brand valuation equations relating equilibrium market shares to quality adjusted prices and marketing levels and diffusion equations describing the dynamic adjustment process we find that consumption externalities influence both valuations and rates of diffusion and that they operate at the brand and not the therapeutic class level

commodity taxation in a differentiated oligopoly the authors introduce commodity taxation into a vertical differentiation model with endogenous product selection they show that a uniform ad valorem tax lowers both qualities distorts the allocation of consumers between firms and lowers the consumer prices of both variants a small uniform tax is always welfare improving over the no tax equilibrium a differentiation of tax rates may or may not be desirable on welfare grounds if a welfare improvement is possible through a nonuniform tax it is always the high quality variant that must be taxed at a higher rate copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the quality double whammy this research focuses on how consumers perceive the quality level of a complex stimulus in our case a service encounter and how this perception affects consumers overall assessment of the quality level of the firm as such it should be of interest to consumer behavior theorists as well as to those involved in marketing management issues we start our presentation by developing a normative bayesian data integration and updating model somewhat similar to that put forth by rust et al 1999 the major constructs of interest in this model are the person s belief about the overall service quality level of a firm and what will happen on the next service encounter two major results following from this baseline normative model are that the updated means of these two beliefs are identical to the dynamic updating equations put forth by boulding et al 1993 and that an underlying assumption of this model is that consumers form unbiased perceptions of the complex stimulus next based on substantial empirical evidence from the behavioral literature we incorporate into this baseline model a process by which consumers form nonrandom perceptions specifically we postulate that a person s perception of a complex service encounter is a blend of the objective dimensions of the service encounter and the person s prior overall belief about the quality level of the firm the relative weights placed on these two factors are determined at least in part by the experience level of the customer and the complexity of the service encounter we then use this expanded model to compare and test different models of service quality and provide deeper insights into the process by which consumers form perceptions of both the service transaction and the overall service quality level of a firm we test this model using data from two different experiments in each experiment we manipulate the service provided and the person s initial will and should expectations using both obtrusive and unobtrusive measures of the underlying constructs of our model we employ multiple tests to determine the veracity of our expanded model relative to the baseline model these tests support the expanded model specification as found previously and as predicted by a bayesian updating process consumers prior beliefs influence their cumulative overall opinion of service quality e g anderson and sullivan 1993 bolton and drew 1991 boulding et al 1993 rust et al 1999 perhaps more importantly these prior beliefs also influence their perceptions of the data themselves which in turn affect their new updated overall opinion these two different influences of prior beliefs on cumulative evaluations of quality constitute the double whammy referred to in the title this double whammy effect has major managerial significance specifically we see from our model development that all activities of a firm will be perceived in light of a person s prior beliefs and that these priors will be double counted relative to our baseline model thus any marketing action taken by a firm will be perceived more positively or negatively depending on the person s prior belief about the quality level of the firm as such our model provides a formal explanation for the notion of brand equity as differential leverage in marketing activities as proposed by keller 1993

environmental policy in a green market this paper studies the impact of some frequently used environmental policies in a duopolistic market where purchasers are willing to pay more for less polluting goods when consumers differ in their environmental awareness a cleaner and a dirtier variant coexist in equilibrium the higher the average willingness to pay for the good the lower are variants unit emissions but the higher are industrial aggregate effluents a maximum unit emission standard reduces unit emissions of both variants but boosts firms sales and consequently increases industrial aggregate emissions as a result social welfare may be reduced we also explore the effects of technological subsidies and product charges including differentiation of charges

on the taxation of polluting products in a differentiated industry this paper studies the provision of environmental quality in an imperfectly competitive market it uses a vertical differentiation model in which the free entry equilibrium results in an under provision of quality the following main results are obtained first a commodity tax may have a significant impact on the market structure in this setting it tends to increase the number of active firms second through its impact on market structure a commodity tax may be welfare improving even though quality creates a positive externality third a commodity tax may bring about an equilibrium that is arbitrarily close to a pareto efficient allocation

a theory of the spoils system in a spoils system it is axiomatic that to the winners go the spoils this essay formalizes spoils systems as cooperative games with winners given by a simple game structure and represented by a fixed number of political appointments we analyze the resulting spoils games by means of the non transferable utility value and we offer two practical applications of the results

measuring the impact of promotions on brand switching when consumers are forward looking abstract logit choice models have been used extensively to study promotion response this article examines whether brand switching elasticities derived from these models are overestimated as a result of rational consumer adjustment of purchase timing to coincide with promotion schedules and whether a dynamic structural model can address this bias using simulated data the authors first show that if the structural model is correct brand switching elasticities are overestimated by stand alone logit models a nested logit model improves the estimates but not completely second the authors estimate the models on real data the results indicate that the structural model fits better and produces sensible coefficient estimates the authors then observe the same pattern in switching elasticities as they do in the simulation third the authors predict sales assuming a 50 increase in promotion frequency the reduced form models predict much higher sales levels than does the dynamic structural model the autho

the advertising mix for a search good we extend the persuasion game to bring it squarely into the economics of advertising we model advertising as exciting consumer interest into learning more about the product and determine a firm s equilibrium choice of advertising content over quality information price information and horizontal match information equilibrium is unique whenever advertising is necessary the outcome is a separating equilibrium with quality unravelling lower quality firms need to provide more information for a given quality level as a function of consumer visit costs first quality information is disclosed then price information and then horizontal product information are added to the advertising mix some suggestive evidence is provided from airline ads in newspapers this paper was accepted by j miguel villas boas marketing

a simple theory of advertising as a good or bad our analysis treats advertisements and the goods advertised as complements in stable metautility functions and generates new results for advertising by building on and extending the general analysis of complements by assimilating the theory of advertising into the theory of complements we avoid the special approaches to advertising found in many studies that place obstacles in the way of understanding the effects of advertising we also use this approach to evaluate advertising from a welfare perspective whether there is excessive or too little advertising depends on several variables the effects on consumer utility the degree of competition in the market for advertised goods the induced changes in prices and outputs of advertised goods and whether advertising is sold to consumers

technological extinctions of industrial firms an inquiry into their nature and causes after a buildup in the number of firms new industries commonly experience a shakeout in which the number of firms declines sharply three theoretical perspectives on how technological change contributes to industry shakeouts are analyzed the theories are used to synthesize predictions concerning technological change and industry evolution the predictions inform an analysis of four us industries that experienced sharp shakeouts automobiles tires televisions and penicillin using data on firm participation and innovation from the commercial inception of the four products through their formative eras we uncover regularities in how the products evolved the regularities suggest that shakeouts are not triggered by particular technological innovations nor by dominant designs but by an evolutionary process in which technological innovation contributes to a mounting dominance by some early entering firms copyright 1997 by oxford university press

invited paper learning models an assessment of progress challenges and new developments learning models extend the traditional discrete choice framework by postulating that consumers have incomplete information about product attributes and that they learn about these attributes over time in this survey we describe the literature on learning models that has developed over the past 20 years using the model of erdem and keane as a unifying framework erdem t keane m 1996 decision making under uncertainty capturing dynamic brand choice processes in turbulent consumer goods markets marketing sci 15 1 1 20 we describe how subsequent work has extended their modeling framework and applied learning models to a wide range of different products and markets we argue that learning models have contributed greatly to our understanding of consumer behavior in particular in enhancing our understanding of brand loyalty and long run advertising effects we also discuss the limitations of existing learning models and potential extensions one key challenge is to disentangle learning as a source of

will it ever fly modeling the takeoff of really new consumer durables a consistent pattern observed for really new household consumer durables is a takeoff or dramatic increase in sales early in their history the takeoff tends to appear as an elbow shaped discontinuity in the sales curve showing an average sales increase of over 400 in contrast most marketing textbooks as well as diffusion models generally depict the growth of new consumer durables as a smooth sales curve our discussions with managers indicate that they have little idea about the takeoff and its associated characteristics many managers did not even know that most successful new consumer durables had a distinct takeoff their sales forecasts tend to show linear growth yet knowledge about the takeoff is crucial for managers to decide whether to maintain increase or withdraw support of new products it is equally important for industry analysts who advise investors and manufacturers of complementary and substitute products although previous studies have urged researchers to examine the takeoff no research has addressed this critical event while diffusion models are commonly used to study new product sales growth they do not explicitly consider a new product s takeoff in sales indeed diffusion researchers frequently use data only from the point of takeoff therefore nothing is known about the takeoff or models appropriate for this event our study provides the first analysis of the takeoff in particular we address three key questions i how much time does a newly introduced product need to takeoff ii does the takeoff have any systematic patterns iii can we predict the takeoff we begin our study by developing an operational measure to determine when the takeoff occurs we found that when the base level of sales is small a relatively large percentage increase could occur without signaling the takeoff conversely when the base level of sales is large the takeoff sometimes occurs with a relatively small percentage increase in sales therefore we developed a threshold for takeoff this is a plot of percentage sales growth relative to a base level of sales common across all categories we define the takeoff as the first year in which an individual category s growth rate relative to base sales crosses this threshold the threshold measure correctly identifies the takeoff in over 90 of our categories we model the takeoff with a hazard model because of its advantages for analyzing time based events we consider three primary independent variables price year of introduction and market penetration as well as several control variables the hazard model fits the pattern of takeoffs very well with price and market penetration being strong correlates of takeoff our results provide potential generalizations about the time to takeoff and the price reduction nominal price and penetration at takeoff in particular we found that on average for 16 post world war ii categories the price at takeoff is 63 of the introductory price the time to takeoff from introduction is six years the penetration at takeoff is 1 7 the time to takeoff is decreasing for more recent categories for example the time to takeoff is 18 years for categories introduced before world war ii but only six years for those introduced after world war ii many of the products in our sample had a takeoff near three specific price points in nominal dollars 1000 500 and 100 in addition we show how the hazard model can be used to predict the takeoff the model predicts takeoff one year ahead with an expected average error of 1 2 years it predicts takeoff at a product s introduction with an expected average error of 1 9 years even against the simple mean time to takeoff of six years for recent categories the model s performance represents a tremendous improvement in prediction it represents an immeasurable improvement in prediction for managers who currently have no idea about how long it takes for a new product to takeoff the threshold rule for determining takeoff can be used to distinguish between a large increase in sales and a real takeoff some limitations of this study could provide fruitful areas for future research our independent variables suffer from endogeneity bias so alternative variables or methods could address this limitation also the takeoff may be related to additional variables such as relative advantage over substitutes and the presence of complementary products finally examination of sales from takeoff to their leveling off could be done with an integrated model of takeoff and sales growth or with the hazard model we propose generalizations about this period of sales growth could also be of tremendous importance to managers of new products

the impact of foreign direct investment on new firm survival in the uk evidence for static versus dynamic industries the paper examines the impact of foreign direct investment fdi on the survival of business start ups fdi has potential for both negative displacement competition effects as well as positive knowledge spillover and linkage effects on new ventures we find a net positive effect for the whole dataset however a major contribution of the paper is to outline and test an argument that this effect is likely to be comprised of a net negative effect in dynamic industries high churn firm entry plus exit relative to the stock of firms alongside a net positive effect in static low churn industries we find evidence to support this view the results identify new effects of globalisation on enterprise development with associated challenges for industrial policy

understanding responses to contradictory information about products although prior literature has examined reactions to drastic negative news we examine the situation in which decision makers receive contradictory information about products and they have to decide whether to persist with or abandon product usage we investigate physician reactions to conflicting information concerning the cardiovascular risk of avandia a diabetes drug we examine how beliefs about both drug effectiveness and drug safety are updated and speculate that experience expertise and self efficacy impact how such information is integrated with current quality beliefs unlike previous bayesian learning models we consider that some signals such as positive and negative news releases and the firm s marketing effort may be biased in that they provide an opinionated point of view the results show interesting differences in how physician types specialists hospital based primary care physicians heavy and light prescribers update their beliefs and the information sources they use to do so we find evidence that safety issues about avandia resulted in spillover concern to close competitor actos the results have implication for determining who should be targeted and what vehicles should be used if a firm is faced with a situation where consumers are in a quandary because of receiving conflicting messages

advertising as signal jamming abstract this paper considers a model of informative advertising that allows firms to jam the consumers signals on product quality before choosing prices at a second stage we find that the price competition at the second stage may overrule the basic insights from the signal jamming approach in other areas of application as a consequence a firm may advertise more intensely the higher is the difference of the expected product qualities moreover a firm s optimal advertising intensity can decrease with quality uncertainty

a diffusion model incorporating product benefits price income and information we start by assuming that a major benefit of many new durable products such as dishwashers and microwave ovens is time savings others such as vcrs also enhance the value of our leisure time using a household production framework we demonstrate that a utility maximizing individual will have a reservation price for the product which is a function of the product benefits and his wage rate by assuming that the wage rate has an extreme value distribution across the population we are able to derive for the aggregate process an income price dependent logistic adoption equation we then allow for the possibility that certain eligible consumers may delay their purchase of the product because they are unaware that it exists are suspicious of its quality or expect its price to fall unawareness uncertainty and hope for further price declines are assumed to decrease with the increase in the number of previous adopters the resulting diffusion model has the property that the product life cycle phenomenon can be explained jointly or separately by the income price process and the awareness uncertainty expectations process using data on household income on durable penetration within different income classes and on first purchase sales the aggregate diffusion model and its premises are tested and supported it is found that both the income price and awareness uncertainty expectations processes are at work however the dependence of the awareness uncertainty expectations delay process on the number of previous adopters e g word of mouth type effect exists only in certain product categories and is usually relatively weak it is demonstrated that if the word of mouth type effects are weak a price skimming strategy is optimal for a monopolist and also is likely to be implemented by oligopolists the sales forecasting implications of the model also are pursued

innovation diffusion in the presence of supply restrictions innovation diffusion models are developed to represent the spread of a new product from its manufacturers to its ultimate users in the marketplace however the growth of a new product can be retarded by supply restrictions such as the unavailability of the product due to limitations on the production capacity or difficulties encountered in setting up distribution systems in the presence of supply restrictions diffusion models must be developed to capture the dynamics of supply restrictions and to allow management to evaluate the impact of such supply restrictions on the growth of a new product in the market place based on the bass innovation diffusion model the objective of this paper is to suggest a parsimonious diffusion model that integrates the demand side dynamics with the supply side restrictions the sensitivity of innovation diffusion patterns in the presence of supply restrictions is examined an application examining the diffusion of new telephones in israel is documented to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed model

learning from experience simply there is substantial academic interest in modeling consumer experiential learning however approximately optimal solutions to forward looking experiential learning problems are complex limiting their behavioral plausibility and empirical feasibility we propose that consumers use cognitively simple heuristic strategies we explore one viable heuristic index strategies and demonstrate that they are intuitive tractable and plausible index strategies are much simpler for consumers to use but provide close to optimal utility they also avoid exponential growth in computational complexity enabling researchers to study learning models in more complex situations well defined index strategies depend on a structural property called indexability we prove the indexability of a canonical forward looking experiential learning model in which consumers learn brand quality while facing random utility shocks following an index strategy consumers develop an index for each brand separately and choose the brand with the highest index using synthetic data we demonstrate that an index strategy achieves nearly optimal utility at substantially lower computational costs using iri data for diapers we find that an index strategy performs as well as an approximately optimal solution and better than myopic learning we extend the analysis to incorporate risk aversion other cognitively simple heuristics heterogeneous foresight and an alternative specification of brands

halo spillover effects in social media do product recalls of one brand hurt or help rival brands abstractonline chatter is important because it is spontaneous passionate information rich granular and live thus it can forewarn and be diagnostic about potential problems with automobile models known as nameplates the authors define perverse halo or negative spillover as the phenomenon whereby negative chatter about one nameplate increases negative chatter for another nameplate the authors test the existence of such a perverse halo for 48 nameplates from four different brands during a series of automobile recalls the analysis is by individual and panel vector autoregressive models the study finds that perverse halo is extensive it occurs for nameplates within the same brand across segments and across brands within segments it is strongest between brands of the same country perverse halo is asymmetric being stronger from a dominant brand to a less dominant brand than vice versa apology advertising about recalls has harmful effects on both the recalled brand and its rivals furthermore

social contagion and income heterogeneity in new product diffusion a meta analytic test standard diffusion models capture social contagion only coarsely and do not allow one to operationalize different contagion mechanisms moreover there is increasing skepticism about the importance of contagion and as has long been known s shaped diffusion curves can also result from heterogeneity in the propensity to adopt we present hypotheses about conditions under which specific contagion mechanisms and income heterogeneity are more pronounced and test these hypotheses using a meta analysis of the q p ratio in applications of the bass diffusion model the ratio is positively associated with the gini index of income inequality in a country supporting the heterogeneity in thresholds interpretation the ratio also varies as predicted by the gamma shifted gompertz diffusion model but the evidence vanishes after controlling for national culture as to contagion the q p ratio varies with the four hofstede dimensions of national culture for three of them in a direction consistent with the social contagion interpretation furthermore products with competing standards have a higher q p ratio which is again consistent with the social contagion interpretation finally we find effects of national culture only for products without competing standards suggesting that technological effects and culturally moderated social contagion effects might not operate independently from each other

a general equilibrium view of global rebound effects abstract how do energy efficiency gains affect energy consumption the effects are generally called rebound effects in the literature previous studies have extensively focused on only part of the global economy to study rebound effects e g energy consumption by households one industry or one country however since the global economy is highly connected among countries these studies may lead to misleading conclusions if the rebound effects in the rest of the economy are significant recently saunders 2008 analyzes the demand side by taking the global economy as a whole wei 2007 also provides a general analysis by using cobb douglas production functions for the global economy the present article expands wei 2007 general analysis to explore the rebound effects from an economist s viewpoint by taking the global economy as a whole and applying general forms of production functions the analysis provides new insights related to rebound effects we highlight the role of energy supply as a determinant of rebound we show that the substitution between energy resources and other productive resources is more relevant to long term rebound we predict that long term rebound may be lower than short term rebound and we also discover that super conservation can happen in both the short term and the long term

evolutionary trends of industry variables abstract the paper offers empirical evidence on the evolutionary trends of industry variables it investigates the time path of patents product price and quantity and number of firms from the first introduction of a product to maturity of the market the paper extends earlier work by gort and klepper by expanding the data on products through 1991 and augmenting it with new products and new data sources the reexamination of the aging patterns reveal the gort and klepper results to be robust the time trends follow the expected patterns with remarkable consistency and are strongly significant for most products new evidence on patenting activity reveal an eventual decline in technological activity over the later years of the product market life cycle

global takeoff of new products culture wealth or vanishing differences the authors study the takeoff of 16 new products across 31 countries 430 categories to analyze how and why takeoff varies across products and countries they test the effect of 12 hypothesized drivers of takeoff using a parametric hazard model the authors find that the average time to takeoff varies substantially between developed and developing countries between work and fun products across cultural clusters and over calendar time products take off fastest in japan and norway followed by other nordic countries the united states and some countries of midwestern europe takeoff is driven by culture and wealth plus product class product vintage and prior takeoff most importantly time to takeoff is shortening over time and takeoff is converging across countries the authors discuss the implications of these findings

academic spin off s transfer speed analyzing the time from leaving university to venture for academic spin offs i analyze the length of time between the founder s leaving of academia and the establishment of his firm technology transfer can take place even years after leaving the mother institution a duration analysis reveals that a longer time lag is caused by the necessity of assembling complementary skills either by acquisition by a single founder or by searching for suitable team members furthermore new ventures are established earlier if the intensity of technology transfer is high the founders have access to university infrastructure or received informal support by former colleagues

the making of an oligopoly firm survival and technological change in the evolution of the u s tire industry the number of producers in the u s tire industry grew for 25 years and then declined sharply and the industry evolved to be an oligopoly the role of technological change in shaping the industry s market structure is explored a model of industry evolution featuring technological change is used to derive predictions that are tested using a novel data set on firm entry exit size location distribution networks and technological choices prior to the shakeout of producers consistent with the model earlier entering and larger firms survived longer principally because of the influence of age and size on technological change

try it you ll like it or will you the perils of early free trial promotions for high tech service adoption the proliferation of free trials for high tech services calls for a careful study of their effectiveness and the drivers thereof on one hand free trials can generate new paying subscribers by allowing consumers to become acquainted with the service free of charge on the other hand a disappointing trial experience might alienate potential customers when they decide not to adopt the system and are lost for good this dilemma is particularly worrisome in early periods when service quality has not been tried and tested in the field and breakdowns occur we accommodate these phenomena in a model of consumers free trial and regular adoption decisions among other effects it incorporates usage and word of mouth based learning about quality in a setting where quality itself is evolving consumers are forward looking in that they account for changes in quality and anticipate uncertainty reduction due to trial usage we estimate our model and run simulations on the basis of a rich and unique data set t

cross selling investment products with a win win perspective in portfolio optimization we propose a novel approach to cross selling investment products that considers both the customers and the bank s interests our goal is to improve the risk return profile of the customer s portfolio and the bank s profitability concurrently essentially creating a win win situation while deepening the relationship with an acceptable product our cross selling approach takes the customer s status quo bias into account by starting from the existing customer portfolio rather than forming an efficient portfolio from scratch we estimate a customer s probability of accepting a product offer with a predictive model using readily available data then we model the investment product cross selling problem as a nonlinear mixed integer program that maximizes a customer s expected return from the proposed portfolio while ensuring that the bank s profitability improves by a certain factor we implemented our methodology at the private banking division of yapi kredi the fourth largest private bank in turkey emp

power majority voting and linear income tax schedules abstract we compare the linear income tax solutions of a version of the aumann kurz power and taxes game and the majority voting model we establish that an agent whose type is in the majority receives a lower payoff in this model than in the majority voting model this reflects the possibilities for bargaining and coalition formation considered in the aumann kurz model the solutions of an example are computed and compared with the optimal utilitarian the optimal rawlsian and the majority voting equilibrium linear income tax schedules

demand heterogeneity and technology evolution the evolution of technology has been a central issue in the strategy and organizations literature however the focus of much of this work has been on what is essentially the supply side of techn

is hospital competition socially wasteful we study the consequences of hospital competition for medicare beneficiaries heart attack care from 1985 to 1994 we examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets and how hospital competition interacts with the influence of managed care organizations to affect the key determinants of social welfare expenditures on treatment and patient health outcomes in the 1980s the welfare effects of competition were ambiguous but in the 1990s competition unambiguously improves social welfare increasing hmo enrollment over the sample period partially explains the dramatic change in the impact of hospital competition

competitive reactions to advertising and promotion attacks how do competitors react to each other s price promotion and advertising attacks what are the reasons for the observed reaction behavior we answer these questions by performing a large scale empirical study on the short run and long run reactions to promotion and advertising shocks in over 400 consumer product categories over a four year time span our results clearly show that the most predominant form of competitive response is passive in nature when a reaction does occur it is usually retaliatory in the same instrument i e promotion attacks are countered with promotions and advertising attacks are countered with advertising there are very few long run consequences of any type of reaction behavior by linking reaction behavior to both cross and own effectiveness we further demonstrate that passive behavior is often a sound strategy while firms that do opt to retaliate often use ineffective instruments resulting in spoiled arms accommodating behavior is observed in only a minority of cases and often results in a missed sales opportunity when promotional support is reduced the ultimate impact of most promotion and advertising campaigns depends primarily on the nature of consumer response not the vigilance of competitors

dynamic effects of the order of entry on market share trial penetration and repeat purchases for frequently purchased consumer goods a time series cross sectional analysis of 18 successful later entrants in 8 categories of consumer packaged goods over the period from october 1983 to january 1988 confirms previous empirical findings that after correcting for differences in marketing effort later entrants suffer a long term market share disadvantage new evidence of the penalties associated with later entry are found in statistical estimation of models of cumulative trial first repeat and subsequent repeat purchasing significantly lower asymptotic levels are found in both trial and repeat behavior however based on this data the rate of approach of later entrants to their lower asymptotic performance measures is either equal to or faster than early entrants and provides evidence of a compensating partial effect accrued by later entrants

informing transforming and persuading disentangling the multiple effects of advertising on brand choice decisions prior behavioral research has suggested that advertising can influence a consumer s quality evaluation through informative and transformative effects the informative effect acts directly to inform a consumer of product attributes and hence shapes her evaluations of brand quality the transformative effect affects the consumer s evaluation of brand quality by enhancing her assessment of her subsequent consumption experience in addition advertising may influence a consumer s utility directly even without providing any explicit information this is the persuasive effect in this paper we propose a framework that formally models the processes through which all three effects of advertisements impact consumers brand evaluations and their subsequent brand choice decisions in particular we model source credibility confirmatory bias and bounded rationality on the part of consumers by appropriately modifying the standard bayesian learning approach our model conforms closely to prior behavioral literature and the experimental findings therein in our empirical analysis we get significant estimates of both informative and transformative effects across brands we find interesting temporal patterns across the effects for instance the importance of transformative effects seem to grow over time while that of informative effects diminishes finally we conduct policy experiments to examine the impact of increased ad intensity on advertising effects as well as the role played by consumption ambiguity

conceptualising the heterogeneity of research based spin offs a multi dimensional taxonomy abstract research based spin offs rbsos have become an important aspect of the technology transfer process emanating from what is conventionally a non commercial environment rbsos pose major challenges if they are to realise their potential to meet the objectives of their founders and the parent research organisations pros from which they emerge an important issue is to understand the heterogeneity of rbsos this paper reviews the literature on rbso typologies to develop a taxonomy of rbsos we identify common themes in relation to these typologies in relation to 1 spin off creation and 2 spin off development the dimensions that differentiate between firms are the type of resources the business model and the institutional link we identify gaps in current typologies in order to propose avenues for future conceptual and empirical research

regional drivers of on farm energy production in bavaria abstract bavaria s energy policy seeks to increase the share of power supply from renewable sources related to on farm energy production agricultural biogas wind and solar energy from currently 15 to more than 30 in 2021 it is therefore of particular interest for policy makers to identify regional drivers of and barriers to this concept the presented study addresses this issue and applies a spatial regression analysis to bavaria s 71 rural counties the findings indicate significant impacts of technological regional transformation ability agricultural structure degree of professionalization and consolidation of organic farming and neighborhood effects this is in contrast to most geographical factors which seem to be of minor relevance

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

strategic entry before demand takes off in developing industries firms have to decide whether and when to enter the market depending on the state of demand existing firms in the industry and the firm s capabilities this paper investigates a model of increasing demand in which firms decide when to enter the market anticipating the strategic behavior of other potential entrants and the effects of entry on future potential entrants this paper shows that the ability of early entry to deter future competitors entry leads firms to enter the market at a rate faster than demand is expanding if there is the potential for many firms to enter the market firms may be less likely to enter because of future competitor entry to correct any market opportunities if firms enter the market depending on their fixed capabilities rather than depending on the firm s circumstances at each moment in time firms end up entering the market at a faster rate in the early periods

empirical generalizations and marketing science a personal view marketing has matured to the point where it seems desirable to take stock of where we are what we have learned and fruitful directions for extending the knowledge base that has developed science is a process involving the interaction between empirical generalizations and theory an empirical generalization is a pattern or regularity that repeats over different circumstances and that can be described simply by mathematical graphic or symbolic methods one of the purposes of the empirical generalizations conference held at wharton on february 16 18 1994 was to develop a list of examples of such empirical generalizations in marketing empirical generalization can precede a theory to explain it or it can be predicted by a theory science is the process of interaction between theory and data that leads to higher level theories examples are provided here of empirical generalizations in marketing and their theoretical counterparts one example is provided of a higher level theory

the evolution of new industries and the determinants of market structure several empirical regularities concerning firm growth rates and industry firm size distributions have been developed by studying primarily mature industries the primary purpose of this article is to bring together and extend empirical regularities on the evolution of new industries and to use these regularities to gain further insight into the forces governing industry evolution to explain these regularities a model is constructed which emphasizes how factors governing the early evolution of industries may shape their market structure at maturity it stresses how chance events and exogenous factors that influence the number of potential entrants to the industry the growth rate of incumbents and the ease of imitation of industry leaders will influence the ultimate number and size distribution of firms in the industry

intergenerational hybrids spillbacks spillforwards and adapting to technology discontinuities during technological discontinuities incumbents frequently develop hybrids of competing technical generations although some prior work implies that such intergenerational hybrids may be the result of organizational dysfunction we propose that in some cases hybrids may be sophisticated learning tools that shape organizational adaptation to a technological discontinuity in this paper we suggest two mechanisms through which intergenerational hybrids may affect organizational adaptation spillbacks and spillforwards in an empirical test among the population of automobile carburetor manufacturers during a technological discontinuity we observe that organizations developing intergenerational hybrids capture spillback benefits knowledge spillovers from an emerging technology generation to the current generation furthermore we find that these same organizations also capture spillforwards spillover benefits from developing higher performing intergenerational hybrids that improve their product performance in the future technology generation these results suggest that intergenerational hybrids may be stepping stones for organizations to learn about and adapt to technology discontinuities

the intra industry effect of corporate environmental violation an exploratory study abstract regenerative sustainability at firm level is a matter of proactive corporate environmental strategy to prevent firms from committing environmental misconducts which not only do harm to the ecological environment but also arouse negative reactions from stakeholders drawing on signaling theory this study explores the intra industry effect of corporate environmental violations of chinese listed companies we propose that the environmental violation announcement carries predominantly negative information regarding rival firms and thus the stock market reacts negatively not only to the firms who commit environmental violations but also to rival firms empirical results corroborate the intra industry contagion effect for rival firms whose cash flow characteristics are similar to those of the violating firm and also reveal that official disclosure of environmental violations committed by a state owned enterprise soe inflicts an additional adverse effect on rival soes to some extent additionally the intra industry effect is shown to be more profound in non environmentally sensitive industries finally the stock market is found to be more sensitive to environmental violations occurring within final goods industries than intermediate goods industries

malpractice law physicians financial incentives and medical treatment how do they interact abstractthe effects of malpractice law and financial incentives on physicians are typically studied independently this paper shows that to make both positive and normative statements about medical malpractice liability one must consider physicians legal and financial incentives jointly i develop a simple model to show that when treatment is unprofitable at the margin mitigation of liability lowers treatment levels conversely when treatment is profitable mitigation of liability raises them motivated by this simple theoretical framework i analyze the impact of a tort reform in texas that mitigated malpractice liability consistent with the theory the rate of cesarean sections among commercially insured mothers for whom the procedure is considered profitable increased by 2 percentage points relative to the rate of cesarean sections among mothers covered by medicaid for whom the procedure is thought to be unprofitable

umbrella branding as a signal of new product quality an example of signalling by posting a bond i present a signalling model in which a multiproduct firm can use its reputation as a bond for quality by using a brand name for an established product when it introduces a new experience good as out of equilibrium beliefs are specified a false signal may be taken to imply that both the established and the new product are of low quality in contrast the absence of a signal leaves open the possibility that one of the two products is of high quality hence the signal can be credible without excessive sunk costs as long as the bond posted is sufficiently large

the life cycle of a competitive industry firm numbers first rise then later fall as an industry evolves this nonmonotonicity is explained using a competitive model in which innovation opportunities fuel entry and relative failure to innovate prompts exit equilibrium time paths for price and quantity also share features of the data the model is estimated using data from the u s automobile tire industry a particularly dramatic example of the nonmonotonicity in firm numbers

tax subsidy policies in the presence of environmentally aware consumers abstract we study policy measures to improve environmental quality in the presence of environmentally aware consumers we consider two sets of policy instruments uniform policies for the firms and policies that discriminate between the firms based on their environmental quality for the latter set either the better performer is rewarded with a subsidy or the worse performer is punished with a tax we find that while a uniform subsidy policy improves average environmental quality a uniform tax policy worsens it further while a discriminatory subsidy policy reduces total pollution and enhances aggregate welfare a discriminatory tax policy may increase total pollution and may reduce aggregate welfare

perception spillovers across competing brands a disaggregate model of how and when abstract drawing on the accessibility diagnosticity framework and previous literature on branding and order of entry the authors hypothesize that perception spillovers can also occur across directly competing products that do not share a common brand name the authors suggest two mechanisms prior perception spillover and dynamic perception spillover and one moderating variable product brand similarity to test for spillovers across competing brands the authors develop a structural bayesian learning model and estimate it using prescription choice and marketing communication data from a panel of physicians from their model results the authors find evidence of prior and dynamic perception spillovers across competing brands only when brands are sufficiently similar in contrast they find no evidence of spillover effects across brands that are highly dissimilar finally several policy experiments illustrate the strength and significance of competitive spillovers for product diffusion and from the re

price uncertainty and consumer search a structural model of consideration set formation we offer an econometric framework that models consumer s consideration set formation as an outcome of her costly information search behavior because frequently purchased products are characterized by frequent price promotions of varying depths of discounts a consumer faces significant uncertainty about the prices of the brands the consumers engage in a fixed sample search strategy that results in their discovering the posted prices of a subset of the available brands this subset is referred to as the consumer s consideration set the proposed model is estimated using the scanner data set for liquid detergents our key empirical results are i consumers zincur significant search costs to discover the posted prices of the brands ii whereas in store displays and feature ads do not influence consumers quality perceptions of the brands they significantly reduce search costs for observing the prices of the brands iii per capita income of consumer s household significantly increases her search costs and iv the consumers price sensitivity is seriously underestimated if we were to assume that consumers get to know all the posted prices at zero cost the proposed model is also estimated for the ketchup category to enable us to do cross category comparisons of consumers price search behavior

environmental policy and the energy efficiency of vertically differentiated consumer products we analyse optimal environmental policies in a market that is vertically differentiated in terms of the energy efficiency of products considering energy taxes subsidies to firms for investment in more eco friendly products and product standards we are particularly interested in how distributional goals in addition to environmental goals shape the choice of policy instruments we ond that an industry friendly government levies an energy tax to supplement a lax product standard but shies away from subsidies to firms by contrast a consumer friendly government relies heavily on a strict product standard and additionally implements a moderate subsidy to firms but avoids energy taxes

the red queen effect competitive actions and firm performance we investigate the red queen effect as a contest of competitive moves or actions among rivalrous firms the results from a multi industry study of over 4 700 actions confirms the existence of red q

a dynamic model of entry and exit in a growing industry the potential demand in a new industry evolves over time demand is initially low but advertising by the industry s early entrants can speed up demand growth however there is intrinsic uncertainty of the demand level in each period and uncertainty of the demand evolution path which can be affected by the underlying economic environment we construct a dynamic model that features the stochastically and endogenously expanding demand of a new industry and we investigate the optimal entry and exit behavior of firms as the industry evolves we find that firms incentive to enter early depends critically on the cost that early entrants have to pay in developing the market when the cost is high and the benefit spills over to potential entrants firms have an incentive to wait and the probability of entry can increase with the number of incumbents under certain circumstances firms entry strategy is also influenced by the transition of economic states firms are more likely to enter under a state that shows the prospect of demand taking off soon we also find that in the early stage of an industry higher demand uncertainty can induce faster entry

the advantages of entry in the growth stage of the product life cycle an empirical analysis in this article the authors examine how the stage of product life cycle in which a brand enters affects its sales through brand growth and market response after controlling for the order of entry

licensing radical product innovations to speed up the diffusion abstract we present a differential game to study how companies can simultaneously license their innovations to other firms when launching a new product the licensee may cannibalize licensor s sales albeit this can be compensated by gains from royalties nonetheless patent royalties are generally so low that licensing is not an attractive strategy in this paper we consider the role of licensing to speed up the product diffusion word of mouth by licensee s customers and licensee s advertising indirectly push forward sales of the licensing company accelerating new product diffusion we find evidence that licensing can be a potentially profitable strategy however we also find that a weak intellectual property right ipr protection can easily diminish the financial attractiveness of licensing

the effects of advertising prices and distribution on market share volatility although the influence of marketing decision variables on market share has received ample attention in the literature less is known about their effects on volatility this study attempts to shed light on this issue by empirically examining the effects of advertising pricing and distribution not only on market share but also on its volatility using an egarch model we argue that establishing a link between management controlled actions such as advertising pricing and distribution and market share volatility may benefit firms seeking to reduce uncertainty in their market share performance application of the proposed model to data on two markets suvs and minivans suggested that advertising pricing and distribution significantly influence market share volatility

promotion effect on endogenous consumption over the years researchers have found that promotion makes consumers switch brands and purchase earlier or more however it is unclear how promotion affects consumption especially for product categories that are perceived to be versatile and substitutable in this paper we propose a dynamic structural model with endogenous consumption under promotion uncertainty to analyze the promotion effect on consumption this model recognizes consumers as rational decision makers who form promotion expectations and plan their purchase and consumption decisions in light of promotion schedule applying the proposed model to packaged tuna and yogurt we find that endogenous consumption responds to promotion as a result of forward looking and stockpiling behavior this is the first empirical paper that recognizes consumption as an endogenous decision variable and proposes a structural model to offer behavioral explanations on whether how and why promotion encourages consumption for product categories with flexible consumption

monopolist pricing with dynamic demand and production cost this paper deals with pricing of a new product over time by a monopolist who maximizes the discounted profit stream the interdependency of cost and demand on cumulative production makes the problem inherently dynamic cost is assumed to be declining with cumulative production learning curve effect while demand is a function of price and cumulative sales representing word of mouth and saturation effects the paper addresses this problem in a general framework that includes several previous results as special cases and provides new insights in other situations while the learning curve and word of mouth effect cause prices to be lower than the price that maximizes immediate revenues the saturation factor has the opposite effect the price path over time is affected by these factors and the interest rate we characterize the price path under several different situations and interpret the results for policy guidelines