conscious and nonconscious comparisons with price anchors effects on willingness to pay for related and unrelated products abstract exposing consumers to extreme prices can influence the price they are willing to pay for both related and unrelated products drawing on previous theories of anchoring and adjustment and selective accessibility of judgment relevant knowledge the authors provide an account of both asymmetries in the impact of price anchors across product categories and contingencies in the occurrence of these asymmetries four studies show the deliberate consideration of price anchors that can play a key role in whether the effect of the anchors will generalize across product categories specifically an explicit comparison of a product to a price anchor increases the accessibility of features that represent a product available at this price in turn these thoughts influence the price that consumers are willing to pay for these products in the absence of this deliberation however anchors influence both related and unrelated products provided no other cognitive activity occurs in the interim

strengthening the influence of advertised reference prices through information priming the use of advertised reference price promotions such as regularly 119 99 sale price 39 99 is ubiquitous in the marketplace thirty years of research supports the conclusion that advertised reference prices e g 119 99 exert an influence on consumers responses to offer prices e g 39 99 via their assimilative influence on consumers internal reference prices the present research provides an enriched account of this assimilation process specifically three studies show that increasing the overlap in information made accessible by the advertised reference price and information made accessible by the offer price increases the influence of the information primed by the advertised reference price on the construction of the internal reference price consequently the offer price is considered more attractive the identification of this process provides insight into additional variables that moderate the influence of advertised reference prices on downstream deal evaluations implications for theory practice and public policy are discussed

optimal pricing and composition of multiple bundles a two step approach abstract this paper analyzes the problem facing a firm that must determine the optimal composition and pricing of multiple bundles it supplies to a single market segment it is assumed the firm s competitors does not react in the short run to its decisions and that their bundles prices and characteristics are known it is further assumed that potential consumers of bundles are rational and maximize a random utility function the problem is modeled as a mixed integer non linear program though such programs are normally hard to solve using traditional methods the difficulties are circumvented here by taking advantage of the problem s mathematical structure to develop a novel two phase solution approach two aspects of the solution are particularly worthy of note 1 we demonstrate that the optimal price of a bundle marketed by a firm depends on the composition of all the firm s bundles and not on their prices and on the composition and price of all the competitors bundles in the market and 2 that if the consumer choice behavior is described by a logit model then the firm s bundles should be very similar to each other

the search for economics talent doctoral completion and research productivity economists hold an annual talent search in which students from around the world apply to doctoral programs and economics departments top economics phd programs seek candidates with the preparation aptitude drive and creativity to become academic professionals whose research will advance the frontiers of the discipline admission committee members must judge students potential economic talent based on the evidence provided in the application folders which includes standardized test scores course selection and grades quality of the undergraduate institution fellow economists evaluations and other relevant information due to the nonobservability of important characteristics the admission committee s task of matching opportunity with talent constitutes a signaling problem as modeled by michael a spence 1973 what information then credibly signals otherwise unobservable economics talent viewing quantitative graduate record examination gre scores as a proxy for ability ronald g ehrenberg and panagiotis g mavros 1995 found that these scores failed to predict phd completion or time to degree for 25 years of economics phd students at cornell university attributing that result to a poor proxy for ability they recommended obtaining a richer set of information about a student s true ability by using for example the quality of applicants undergraduate institution information from letters of recommendation and the graduate committee s ranking the search for economics talent doctoral completion and research productivity

integration of discrepant sales forecasts the influence of plausibility inferences based on an evoked range abstract the authors hypothesize that when managers integrate two projections to form a sales estimate they evoke and use a sales range to judge inappropriately the plausibility of each projection this judged plausibility as well as the margin of error based on the market research company s typical accuracy is used to assign weights to each projection five experiments find strong evidence for this process and demonstrate a resulting bias

patterns of research output and author concentration in the economics literature this study finds that a strong bibliometric regularity exists in the publication pattern in the economics literature the number of authors publishing n papers is approximately 1 n superscript c of those publishing one paper the economics literature conforms very well to the model with c 1 84 if data are taken from a large collection of journals when applied to individual journals the result shows that values of c range from 2 04 to 3 11 this paper also reports the degree of author concentration among leading economics journals finally this study finds that the graduates of three graduate programs account for more than half of the top 100 authors indicates strong institutional dominance in the production of the most prolific authors copyright 1991 by mit press

please or squeeze brand performance implications of constrained and unconstrained multi item promotions existing research on price promotions typically investigates the effects of single product promotions however brand managers often promote multiple items simultaneously to bolster the performance of a complete brand line this paper investigates the brand performance implications of such multi item promotions we distinguish between two types of multi item promotions traditional unconstrained multi item promotions that grant a discount irrespective of the size or composition of the purchase set and constrained multi item promotions that require consumers to purchase specific quantities self bundling or even predetermined combinations fixed bundling of promoted items using a normative consumer decision model the authors analyze the relative effectiveness of these promotions in terms of unit sales and revenue impact and show that promotion performance is moderated by consumers preference for variety the authors find that unconstrained multi item promotions outperform single item promotions especially in markets without variety seeking in markets with variety seeking unconstrained multi item promotions are not as effective in stealing extra sales from competition because consumers prefer to spread their purchases across all items including competitive ones however in those markets self bundling promotions are particularly effective because they force consumers to adopt larger amounts of the promoted items at the expense of competitors finally in neither type of market does fixed bundling substantially improve promotion performance

measuring heterogeneous reservation prices for product bundles this paper develops a model for capturing continuous heterogeneity in the joint distribution of reservation prices for products and bundles our model is derived from utility theory and captures both within and among subject variability furthermore it provides dollarmetric reservation prices and individual level estimates that allow the firm to target customers and develop customized and nonlinear pricing policies our experiments show that regardless of whether the products are durables or nondurables the model captures heterogeneity and predicts well models that assume homogeneity perform poorly especially in predicting choice of the bundle furthermore the methodology is robust even when respondents evaluate few profiles self stated reservation prices do not have any informational content beyond that contained in the basic model the direct elicitation method appears to understate overstate the variation in reservation prices across consumers for low priced high priced products and bundles hence this method yields biased demand estimates and leads to suboptimal product line pricing policy the optimization results show that the product line pricing policy depends on the degree of heterogeneity in the reservation prices of the individual products and the bundle a uniformly high price strategy for all products and bundles is optimal when heterogeneity is high otherwise a hybrid strategy is optimal

the effects of selling packaged goods on inventory decisions in this paper we study within a newsboy type modeling framework the common business practice of retail firms to sell products not only as independent items but also as part of multiproduct packets packaged goods our emphasis is on understanding the effects of such practices on the inventory decisions of the firm we provide insights on the resulting level of suboptimality when inventory decisions are made with demand information only on the independent items and without accounting for the demand substitution structure induced between independent items and packaged goods our stylized model studies an environment with two products that are not direct substitutes for each other sold either independently or as part of a packet that contains one unit of each we provide necessary and sufficient optimality conditions for this model and suggest an efficient numerical search for obtaining the optimal stocking levels an extensive computational study allowed us to provide insights on the nature of the optimal stocking policies the suboptimality of independent newsboy policies the effects of demand correlation among individual products and multiproduct packets and the determining role of induced substitution structure among products during stockout occasions on the profitability of the inventory system

patterns of research productivity in the business ethics literature insights from analyses of bibliometric distributions in any academic discipline published articles in respective journals represent production units of scientific knowledge and bibliometric distributions reflect the patterns in such outputs across authors or producers closely following the analysis approach used for similar studies in the economics and finance literature we present the first study to examine whether there exists an empirical regularity in the bibliometric patterns of research productivity in the business ethics literature our results present strong evidence that there indeed exists a distinct empirical regularity it is the so called generalized lotka s law of scientific productivity pattern the number of authors publishing n papers is about 1 n c of those publishing one paper we discuss the likely processes that underlie the productivity pattern postulated by the generalized lotka s law we find that the value of the exponent c is equal to about 2 6 for the comprehensive bibliometric data across the two leading business ethics journals the observed research productivity pattern in the business ethics area a relatively young discipline is interestingly very consistent with those found in much older related business disciplines like economics accounting and finance we discuss the general implications of our findings

stimulus context and the formation of consumer ideals when a choice set consists of a distribution of alternatives with correlated benefits and costs consumers often exhibit single peaked preferences they prefer an alternative having moderate costs and benefits theories disagree about how adding additional lower benefit lower cost or higher benefit higher cost alternatives to this choice set will affect relative preferences for the initial set of alternatives prototype theory predicts that adding alternatives should produce assimilation whereas multiattribute range frequency theory predicts that it creates contrast we reconcile these two theories by assuming that single peaked preferences reflect a composition of underlying benefit and cost valuations moreover we claim that the correlational structure of the benefit and cost dimensions in the contextual stimuli determines whether these stimuli will exert an assimilation or contrast effect we show that when benefits and costs are correlated uncorrelated adding alternatives that extend the range of offerings produces assimilation contrast for preference judgments we propose a cost benefit trade off model that incorporates elements of single peaked preference theory and range frequency theory to explain the complex fashion in which contextual stimuli affect consumer ideals

the influence of price discount framing on the evaluation of a product bundle bundle offers consisting of two or more products often include a price discount the impact of the price discount on the perceived attractiveness of the bundle has been shown to depend on which product is discounted it has been argued that discounts are more effective when they are assigned to the product that will receive the most weight in the overall evaluation of the bundle we propose that the perceived value of the discount may also depend on a referent specific to each product six studies are used to provide evidence that 1 price discount framing effects can be explained by reference dependence and 2 that reference dependence and product importance independently contribute to price discount framing effects

the role of human capital in postacquisition ceo departure in this study we examined the postacquisition departure of target firms ceos and found support for the predictions of becker s 1962 human capital theory firms and ceos appear to weigh the cost

firm size and executive compensation using several data sets the relationship between executive income and firm size is shown to be relatively stable over time and in different countries the elasticity of executive earnings to firm size is about the same today as it was in the 1930s with evidence of a decline in the earnings of top executives controlling for firm size in addition to the effects of size and other firm and industry characteristics there are returns to age and experience there is also substantial variability in the level of compensation among firms of comparable size indicating that there may be impediments to mobility

perspective from gaussian to paretian thinking causes and implications of power laws in organizations although normal distributions and related current quantitative methods are still relevant for some organizational research the growing ubiquity of power laws signifies that pareto rank frequency distributions fractals and underlying scale free theories are increasingly pervasive and valid characterizations of organizational dynamics when they apply researchers ignoring power law effects risk drawing false conclusions and promulgating useless advice to practitioners this is because what is important to most managers are the extremes they face not the averages we show that power laws are pervasive in the organizational world and present 15 scale free theories that apply to organizations next we discuss research implications embedded in pareto rank frequency distributions and draw statistical and methodological implications

patterns of productivity in the finance literature a study of the bibliometric distributions this study finds a bibliometric regularity in the finance literature that the number of authors publishing n papers is about 1 nc of those publishing one paper we find that the finance literature conforms very well to the inverse square law c 2 if data are taken from a large collection of journals when applied to individual finance journals we find that values of c range from 1 95 to 3 26 we also find that top rated journals have higher concentrations among their contributors this implies that the phenomenon success breeds success is more common in higher quality publications it is frequently observed in bibliometric matters and in various social phenomena that success breeds success a frequently cited paper is more likely to be cited again than one little cited an author of many papers is more likely to publish again than one who has published little a journal which has been frequently consulted is more likely to be consulted again than one of previously infrequent use this is analogous to the folk saying the rich get richer and the poor get poorer lotka s law of scientific productivity is an example of such empirical laws lotka 1926 proposes an inverse square law relating authors of scientific papers to the number of papers written by each author specifically using data in the decennial index of chemical abstracts and in the name index of auerbach s geschichtstafeln der physik lotka plots the number of authors against the number of contributions made by each author on a logarithmic scale lotka finds that the points are closely scattered around a straight line having a slope of approximately negative two on the basis of this empirical observation lotka concludes the following in the cases examined it is found that the number of persons making 2 contributions is about one fourth of those making one the number making 3 contributions is about one ninth etc the number making n contributions is about 1 n2 of those making one and of all contributors the proportion that make a single contribution is about 60 percent thus lotka s empirical finding can be summarized by the equation an a1 n2 n 1 2 3 1

contextual influences on perceptions of merchant supplied reference prices two contextual variables that have theoretical roots in information processing attribution and social judgment theories were manipulated along with three levels of merchant supplied reference price in a 2 2 3 analysis of variance design results support the hypothesized effects of consistency and distinctiveness as contextual variables that influence internal price standards and purchase evaluations the three price levels resulted in a curvilinear pattern of results for the purchase evaluation and source credibility dependent variables as hypothesized however contrary to assimilation contrast theory the impact of the merchant supplied reference price on estimates of normal and fair prices was monotonic

consumer normal price estimation market versus personal standards in reference price models internal reference price is typically estimated from actual market prices given the generally poor price knowledge consumers have exhibited in prior research the question is whether it is reasonable to use actual market prices to estimate consumers internal reference price standards the initial answer provided in this research surprisingly is yes although internal reference prices are measurable and do affect consumer price perception the gains in measuring and using those standards in predicting brand choice for frequently purchased products may not be worth the costs reasons why the surrogate price measure may work and implications for the measurement of internal reference price standards are considered

learning from mixed feedback anticipation of the future reduces appreciation of the present consumers can evaluate their past choices by comparing their obtained outcome to other possible outcomes we demonstrate that how people process this comparative feedback depends on whether they use it to prepare for future decisions in particular the anticipation of similar future choices increases consumers sensitivity to comparisons with better alternatives and reduces their liking of the chosen option our findings indicate that forward looking consumers selectively test the hypothesis that their current choice can be improved on and as a result disproportionately attend to the unfavorable comparisons and fail to appreciate the value of their current choice

seller beware how bundling affects valuation abstracthow does bundling affect valuation this research proposes the asymmetry hypothesis in the valuation of bundles consumers demand more compensation for the loss of items from bundles compared with the loss of the same items in isolation yet they express lower willingness to pay for items added to bundles compared with the same items purchased separately this asymmetry persists because bundling causes consumers to perceive multiple items as a single inseparable gestalt unit thus consumers resist altering the whole of the bundle by removing or adding items six studies demonstrate this asymmetry across judgments of monetary value studies 1 and 2 and dis satisfaction study 3 moreover bundle composition the ability of different items to create the impression of a whole moderates the effect of bundling on valuation study 4 and the need to replace missing items i e restoring the whole mediates the effect of bundling on compensation demanded for losses study 5 finally the a

the impact of regulation on ceo labor markets i examine empirically whether the executive labor market helps to slot managers with higher education quality into jobs where they can obtain greater returns from their human capital skills comparing a sample of regulated gas and electric firms with manufacturing firms i find that utilities attract ceos with a lower quality education than do unregulated firms comparing a sample of airline firms pre and postderegulation airlines have ceos with a higher quality education postderegulation these results suggest that the labor market slots ceos with a lower quality of education into regulated business environments

the journals of economics we examine the principal journals of economics with particular attention to the communication between journals as reflected by the network of interjournal citations during 1987 90 and the changes over the past century in the characteristics of the authors and the techniques they have used the numerical results and those of the statistical modeling of these results reinforce the importance of economic theory as an exporter of intellectual influence to applied economics the study includes an examination of the degree of specialization among different subfields of economics a statistical model is presented for measuring the flow of intellectual influence as measured by citations in terms of simple univariate scores

coupon value a signal for price in this article the author proposes that consumers use the value of a coupon to estimate price study 1 shows that the higher the percentage discount the higher the perceived price study 2 demon

consumer evaluations of multiple versus single price change this article examines how consumer evaluations of multiple price changes differ from the evaluation of a single price change of an equal amount consistent with r thaler s theory about segregation versus integration of gains and losses we find that multiple price decreases are evaluated more favorably than a single price decrease and multiple price increases are evaluated more unfavorably than a single price increase however these effects are moderated by consumer price uncertainty and relative magnitude of the prices being evaluated because price uncertain consumers consider higher ranges of prices acceptable they are less unfavorable to multiple price increases and more favorable to multiple price decreases than certain consumers moreover when the magnitude of one price is very small relative to other prices consumers preference for multiple price decreases relative to a single price decrease is reduced however this effect is not found when there are price increases

the formation of expected future price a reference price for forward looking consumers among numerous possible reference prices expected future price is important a consumer s expectation of the future price of a brand plays a crucial role in the decision to buy now or later failure to characterize reference price as a forward looking concept a common practice in the reference pricing literature violates premises of neoclassical economic theory and leads to questionable modeling applications explicit measures of future price expectations were obtained and used to test various models of expectations formation providing insight into the effect of expected future price on consumers responses to price promotions and brand choice decisions

publish or perish what the competition is really doing this study provides comprehensive publications performance data over a twenty five year period for finance doctorates these data indicate that publishing one article per year in any finance journal or finance accounting economics or business journal over any prolonged period of time is a truly remarkable feat met by only 5 percent of the graduates tenure screens combining various quantity and quality requirements are examined to assess their ability to predict future publication productivity faculty and administrators seeking defensible benchmarks for evaluating faculty research productivity in finance will find that these data and results are particularly useful copyright 1992 by american finance association

tourists acceptance of euro pricing conjoint measurement with random coefficients abstract pricing in the new european currency may have an influence on how consumers perceive a travel package and the company selling it the paper introduces a set of interconnected explanatory variables which determine the influence of euro pricing versus pricing in local currency an empirical study employs the second generation structural equation modelling to perform random coefficient estimates for the part worth coefficients in a conjoint measurement design

product line rivalry and market segmentation with an application to automobile optional engine pricing this paper addresses the questions whether and when the pricing practices on base products may differ from those of premium products sold with options or add ons various alternative models are considered a monopoly model a model of brand rivalry with full consumer information and a model of rivalry in which consumers are only well informed about base product prices only the brand rivalry model with limited consumer information predicts that premium products have larger percentage markups than base products provided that brand rivalry is sufficiently intense empirical evidence on base and premium product pricing in the automobile market is consistent with the limited information model and inconsistent with the other two models

joint bidding in the name your own price channel a strategic analysis in this paper we study the name your own price nyop channel we examine theoretically and empirically whether asking consumers to place a joint bid for multiple items rather than bid one item at a time as practiced today can increase nyop retailers profits relatedly we also examine whether allowing consumers to self select whether to place a joint bid or itemwise bids increases retailers profits and consumers surplus we construct a dynamic model that incorporates both demand uncertainty and supply uncertainty to address these issues our theoretical analysis identifies the conditions under which joint bidding can increase both nyop retailers profits and consumers surplus we find that some consumers might bid more for the very same items when they place joint bids the increase in bid amount is related to the fact that joint bidding reduces the chance of mismatch between nyop retailers costs and consumer bids we conducted a laboratory study to assess the descriptive validity of some of the

a probabilistic approach to pricing a bundle of products or services the authors propose a probabilistic approach to optimally price a bundle of products or services that maximizes seller s profits their focus is on situations in which consumer decision making is o

how buyers evaluate product bundles a model of anchoring and adjustment how do buyers evaluate a bundle of items the most common approach in earlier economic analyses see e g adams and yellen 1976 schmalensee 1984 was to start with the additivity assumption the overall utility of a bundle equals the sum of the bundle items individual utilities the restrictiveness of this additivity assumption was later recognized and removes dansby and conrad 1984 guiltinan 1987 hanson and martin 1990 however the question of how buyers evaluation processes may account for additivity or a lack thereof has remained largely unexplored

are output growth rate distributions fat tailed some evidence from oecd countries this work explores some distributional properties of aggregate output growth rate time series we show that in the majority of oecd countries output growth rate distributions are well approximated by symmetric exponential power densities with tails much fatter than those of a gaussian fat tails robustly emerge in output growth rates independently of i the way we measure aggregate output ii the family of densities employed in the estimation iii the length of time lags used to compute growth rates we also show that fat tails still characterize output growth rate distributions even after one washes away outliers autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity

research note competitive bundling and counterbundling with generalist and specialist firms bundling which is the practice of selling two or more products or services in a package is a pervasive marketing practice and is often used as a strategic competitive tool however there has not been enough consideration of competitive bundling situations in which exit of a competitor is not a concern in this paper we address this issue by identifying conditions under which strategic competitors may or may not resort to bundling when competitor exit considerations are absent we study competition between a multiproduct generalist firm and two single product specialist firms in two product categories one of which has undifferentiated products and the other has differentiated products in our model the specialist firms can form an alliance to bundle their products in competing with the generalist firm in contrast to the previous literature we find that concurrent bundling by competitors if it occurs in equilibrium is profitable we also find that when one competitor bundles and the other does not the bundling firm gains a greater share of customers and makes a higher profit however when conditions favor counterbundling by a competitor such counterbundling helps the competitor retain its customers finally we note that under other market conditions concurrent bundling by competitors escalates price competition to the extent that retaining customers through bundling is not profitable in such a case we show that strategic competitors are better off having asymmetric product lines with one competitor bundling and the other selling unbundled

transaction decoupling how price bundling affects the decision to consume abstract in today s marketplace price bundling is widespread manufacturers and retailers routinely offer multiple products for a single bundled price although the effects of price bundling on purchase behavior have been well researched the effects of price bundling on postpurchase consumption behavior have received almost no attention in this article the authors build on the sunk cost literature e g thaler 1980 1985 and predict that price bundling leads to a disassociation or decoupling of transaction costs and benefits thereby reducing attention to sunk costs and decreasing a consumer s likelihood of consuming a paid for service e g a theater performance four studies show this to be the case in two lab studies the authors show that having a bundled four day ski pass as opposed to four one day ski tickets decreases a person s likelihood of skiing on the final day of a four day ski vacation they replicate this result in a field study showing that multiperformance ticket holders are

reexamining latitude of price acceptability and price thresholds predicting basic consumer reaction to price behavioral pricing research has shown consumers to have lower and upper price thresholds represented by an inverted u shaped price acceptability function we propose another basic reaction to price namely lower price is better represented by a decreasing acceptability function without a lower price threshold a set of variables is hypothesized to predict consumer reaction to price price consciousness price quality relation and product involvement are shown to influence the shape of the price acceptability function a procedure and model to scale price acceptability and obtain acceptability functions are introduced and applied the cumulative results suggest reliable acceptability scales along with evidence for convergent and construct validity

an empirical analysis of latitude of price acceptance in consumer package goods scanner panel data analyses for sweetened and unsweetened drink categories with four brands in each support the presence of a region of price insensitivity around a reference price the analyses also suggest that consumers with higher average reference price have a wider latitude of price acceptance consumers with a higher frequency of purchase i e shorter average interpurchase time interval are found to have a narrower latitude of price acceptance because they are more aware of the range of price distributions finally consumers with a higher average brand loyalty have a wider latitude of price acceptance demonstrating greater tolerance of price fluctuations

the effect of discount frequency and depth on consumer price judgments the intensity of price discounting by retailers and manufacturers raises important questions about consumer price judgments in the extreme discounting can take the form of frequent but shallow discounts or deep but infrequent discounts the research reported here explores the effects of these strategies on consumer estimation of price levels for competing stores and brands in an initial experiment in which subjects made brand choices over time a depth effect was observed that contrasted with the frequency effect found in previous research subsequent experiments identified the conditions under which depth vs frequency characteristics of price data dominate consumers price estimation judgments frequency information is more influential when sets of interstore or interbrand comparative prices exhibit complex and overlapping distributions hence creating processing difficulty in contrast a depth bias occurs when prices have a simpler dichotomous distribution these results place pragmatically meaningful limitations on the influence of frequency information and illustrate the importance of context in determining consumer price judgments in a promotional environment

gaussian demand and commodity bundling in an important and widely cited essay adams and yellen 1976 examine the use of package selling as a price discrimination device they consider a monopolist producing two goods with constant unit costs and facing buyers with diverse tastes the marginal utility of a second unit of either good is assumed to be zero for all buyers the two goods are independent in demand for all buyers so that any buyer s reservation price for the first unit of either good is independent of the market price of the other thus the maximum amount any buyer would pay for a bundle consisting of one unit of each good is the sum of the two reservation prices and buyers are completely described by the values of those two prices 2 resale markets are assumed away in order to obtain comparative results for alternative pricing strategies the distribution of reservation prices in the adams yellen framework is assumed to be bivariate normal implications of gaussian demand are explored pure bundling is shown to operate by reducing buyer diversity thus facilitating the capture of consumers surplus it generally makes buyers worse off than unbundled sales it is more profitable if average reservation prices are high enough mixed bundling combines advantages of both pure bundling and unbundled sales and it is generally strictly more profitable than either bundling which treats goods symmetrically seems most attractive under symmetric reservation price distributions i am indebted to severin borenstein for superb research assistance to the ford motor company for research support through a grant to m i t and to the harvard economics department for housing me as a visiting scholar while most of this research was performed of course only i can be held responsible for this essay s shortcomings 1 the first clear recognition of this possibility seems to have been by stigler 1968 but also see burstein 1960 2 paroush and peles 1981 relax the assumption that consumers purchase at most one unit of each good but they consider only two types of buyers both with linear demand functions they retain the assumption that demands are independent for all buyers telser 1979 and phillips 1981 use different frameworks to analyze bundling policies spence 1980 explores the relation between bundling across commodities as here and bundling multiple units of the same

insiders vs outsiders in the hotel sector we investigate whether entering an official hotel classification system is as lucrative as suggested in the tourism management literature indeed in countries in which the official hotel classific

a combined monopoly and optimal packaging this paper specifies the conditions under which a profit maximizing monopoly will market a package of two different commodities even when the demands for and the cost of production of each commodity are entirely independent of the other packaging is here a useful way of implicitly discriminating by price especially when explicit price discrimination is not possible some of the welfare applications are discussed

zipf s law for cities an explanation zipf s law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth it says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law the number of cities with populations greater than s is proportional to 1 s suppose that at least in the upper tail all cities follow some proportional growth process this appears to be verified empirically this automatically leads their distribution to converge to zipf s law

a hybrid conjoint model for price demand estimation abstract recent developments in conjoint analysis include the introduction of hybrid models in which part worths estimated from self explicated data are combined with information obtained from full profile evaluations this paper extends the hybrid approach to conjoint problems entailing multiple suppliers with particular emphasis on competitive price relationships

bundling subscription tv channels abstract i analyze a market such as a subscription tv market where multiple varieties of an excludable public good are traded in bundles here bundling is not due to a producer s desire to extract consumers surplus but due to economies of scope in distribution technology the paper studies the pricing and production decisions of a supplier as well as the impacts of certain regulations such as pure bundling or pure components pricing restrictions findings of interest are as follows a profit constrained welfare maximizer would use a pure bundling price system when costs are low and a mixed bundling price system when costs are high a private monopolist produces too few varieties a pure bundling restriction on a private monopolist may increase welfare and consumer surplus but a pure components restriction never increases them

bundling and competition for slots we consider competition between sellers selling multiple distinct products to a buyer having k slots under independent pricing a pure strategy equilibrium often does not exist and equilibrium in mixed strategy is never efficient when bundling is allowed each seller has an incentive to bundle his products and an efficient technology renting equilibrium always exists furthermore in the case of digital goods or when sales below marginal cost are banned all equilibria are efficient comparing the mixed strategy equilibrium with the technology renting equilibrium reveals that bundling often increases the buyer s surplus finally we derive clear cut policy

are ceos really paid like bureaucrats a common view is that there is little correlation between firm performance and ceo pay using a new fifteen year panel data set of ceos in the largest publicly traded u s companies we document a strong relationship between firm performance and ceo compensation this relationship is generated almost entirely by changes in the value of ceo holdings of stock and stock options in addition we show that both the level of ceo compensation and the sensitivity of compensation to firm performance have risen dramatically since 1980 largely because of increases in stock option grants

the effect of semantic cues on consumer perceptions of reference price ads this article examines the differential effects of two types of semantic cues 1 cues connoting that an advertised price discount exhibits low consistency over time and 2 cues connoting that an advertised discount is highly distinctive vis a vis competitors results suggest that for manipulations of external reference prices with offering price held constant semantic cues that connote high distinctiveness are more effective in influencing consumers price related evaluations when the external reference price is otherwise implausibly high than are semantic cues that connote low consistency for manipulations of offering prices with external reference price held constant however semantic cues connoting high distinctiveness exert more relative influence on price related cognitions when offering prices are high

reference prices and deception in newspaper advertising consumers were exposed to newspaper advertisements for four products and one of five different price representations regular price alone sale price alone regular price with manufacturer s suggested list price mslp sale price with regular price or sale price with mslp perceptions of the ordinary prices of the products were not affected by the presence or type of reference price but the subjects did have lower estimates of ordinary prices in the sale context the accuracy of consumer perceptions of ordinary prices was not related to the recency of subject shopping experience for the products as measured in the study

an empirical analysis of internal and external reference prices using scanner data single source yogurt data are used to examine whether both internal and external reference prices affect purchase decisions internal reference prices are memory resident prices based on actual fair or other price concepts external reference prices are observed stimuli such as regular prices that stores may display along with a sale price for comparability discrete choice models with variables representing the two types of reference prices are estimated and both types of variables are found to have significant effects on purchase probabilities this suggests that consumers may use multiple reference points in evaluating price in purchase decisions in addition a model using an indicator of a sale price discount explains purchase probabilities as well as one that models the actual discount which suggests that consumers may be reacting to the indication of savings rather than to the amount of the discount

accounting earnings and top executive compensation abstract this paper investigates the role of accounting earnings in top executive compensation contracts it provides evidence in support of the hypothesis that earnings based incentives help shield executives from market wide factors in stock prices the paper demonstrates that earnings reflect firm specific changes in value but are less sensitive to market wide movements in equity values as a result the inclusion of earnings based performance measures in executive compensation contracts helps shield executives from fluctuations in firm value that are beyond their control the hypothesis is shown to explain cross sectional variation in the use of earnings based incentives

equilibrium warrant pricing models and accounting for executive stock options under apb opinion no 25 compensation expense arising from executive stock options consists of the excess of the market value of the stock over the exercise price of the options on their grant dates if the exercise price equals the market value of the stock on the grant date which is typically the case no compensation expense is recognized this accounting treatment has been frequently criticized for its bias toward underestimating the cost of an option to the issuing firm and a number of alternative valuation models have been suggested in the accounting literature by and large these valuation models have been borrowed from the finance literature where they were developed to explain the pricing of warrants and traded options the purpose of this paper is to assess empirically how well two of these valuation models perform in providing estimates of the value of traded securities warrants that are similar in many respects to executive stock options 2 this evidence should help calibrate the magnitude of the errors

corporate performance and managerial remuneration an empirical analysis abstract economic theories of efficient compensation predict a positive relationship between executive pay and corporate performance and yet efforts to document this relationship have been largely unsuccessful in this paper we argue that previous cross sectional studies have omitted important variables which seriously bias their results using data that focus on individual executives over time we find that executive compensation is strongly positively related to corporate performance as measured by shareholder return and growth in firm sales the results are robust to the stock market performance measure utilized

products with branded components an approach for premium pricing and partner selection an increasing number of products are being sold with components that themselves are brand names examples are personal computers with intel microprocessors and diet soft drinks that use the nutrasweet formulation branded components may alter consumers valuation of the bundle necessitating changes in the ways firms identify and price such bundled products surprisingly the existing marketing literature is silent on this issue the purpose of our paper is to propose an analytical approach that helps marketers of products with branded components make optimal pricing and partner selection decisions our managerial objectives are twofold a to the seller of the bundled product we suggest the optimal bundled product offering optimal selling prices of alternative products revenues and profits and b to the branded component manufacturers we indicate the most favorable alliance partners and payoff gains losses of aligning with other branded components instead of unbranded alternatives our analytical approach is also likely to be helpful to academics researching bundling and ingredient branding issues the specific problem modeled assumes the bundled product has two components that are consumed jointly furthermore each component can be either a brand name or unbranded in this model the consumer has no control over the choice of the components in the bundle the seller decides what form of bundle components i e branded or unbranded to offer we assume that the product that is marketed eventually enjoys a monopoly drawing from research in signaling and brand alliance we posit each branded component may either enrich or suppress the value of the partnering component in the bundle as perceived by the consumers our approach has three methodological stages first we build an individual level model to assess the valuation of alternative products and their principal components at the level of a randomly drawn consumer to do so we rely primarily on the theory of reservation prices and weber s theory on price value changes second we aggregate such valuation across consumers to assess the market s overall valuation for this purpose we invoke parametric distributions based on integral transform theory third we develop payoff functions based on market valuation of alternative products and supply side costs the managerial objectives are met based on results from this stage our approach was successfully applied to the context of a university bookstore that intends to sell windows based laptop computers the two principal components of the laptop computer bundle are the microprocessor chip and the personal computer platform on which the chip is implanted the seller may choose either compaq with intel inside or a simpler bundle featuring one of these with an unbranded complementary component or an entirely unbranded bundle we used data collected from 192 potential consumers via a survey included in the survey were measures of consumers perceptions of functional aspects of the components and their reservation prices for alternative bundled products the approach identified the most profitable bundle for the seller and its optimal price it also provided estimates of the revenue impact of the gain or loss for each branded component by partnering the other branded component instead of the unbranded alternative as such the model facilitates the determination of the optimal price price premium and profits for products with branded components as well as the identification of the ideal partner for each branded component manufacturer it is apt to caution that products with branded components need not always lead to price premiums or lead to win win outcomes reasons such as incongruity between the branded components or domination of one of the components over the other may drive potential consumers away thus hurting profits implications of the results to negotiate component prices are discussed in the paper the study limitations and directions for future research are also presented

equilibrium product bundling this article offers an equilibrium theory of product bundling by rival firms in several models where a primary good is produced in a duopoly market and one or more other goods is produced under perfectly competitive conditions bundling is shown to emerge as an equilibrium strategy of one or both of the duopolists for its role as a product differentiation device when the rival firms can commit to bundling sales their profits are higher but social welfare is reduced copyright 1997 by university of chicago press

travel configuration on consumer trip chained store choice we predict that in evaluating alternative equidistant trip chains i e the combining of multiple destinations into a single outing consumers will choose trip chains where destinations are more clustered i e closer to each other and further from the origin over equidistant trip chains where destinations are less clustered but closer to the origin this prediction is based on the assumptions of diminishing marginal sensitivity and reference point dependence postulated by reference dependent theory results of the first experiment provide support for this prediction results of the second experiment provide evidence that trip chain configuration affects route choice via both facets of reference dependent theory

are internal capital markets efficient using segment information from compustat we find that the investment by a segment of a diversified firm depends on the cash flow of the firm s other segments but significantly less than it depends on its own cash flow the investment by segments of highly diversified firms is less sensitive to their cash flow than the investment of comparable single segment firms the sensitivity of a segment s investment to the cash flow of other segments does not depend on whether its investment opportunities are better than those of the firm s other segments

chapter 11 pricing models in marketing publisher summary this chapter brings together a set of diverse efforts in the recent literature on the modeling of price decisions and related questions in marketing there has been an impressive growth in the array of topics investigated in the literature various trends in the development of pricing models are evident from the foregoing review first one trend has been to develop theoretical models to describe observed pricing strategies in the marketplace and to derive conditions under which certain strategies are optimal this trend is clearly evident when one considers the area of dynamic pricing models another trend is an attempt to develop pricing models in which certain aspects of consumer behavior e g asymmetric response to price increases versus price decreases are incorporated this development is quite recent and does offer a large potential a third dominant direction is the use of game theoretic models for developing equilibrium pricing strategies

savings and prize linked savings accounts abstract many households have insufficient savings to handle moderate and routine consumption shocks many of these financially fragile households also have the highest lottery expenditures as a proportion of income this combination suggests that prize linked savings pls accounts combining security of principal with lottery type jackpots can increase savings among these at risk households results from an online experiment show that the introduction of pls accounts increase total savings and reduce lottery expenditures significantly especially among individuals with the lowest levels of savings and income the results imply that pls accounts offer a plausible market based solution to encourage individuals to increase savings

comment on conjoint analysis of price premiums for hotel amenities firms are often faced with the problem of designing and pricing new products in durables such as houses cars and personal computers and also in services such as hotel accommodations there is a basic unit that the firm can offer at a base price in addition the firm can offer and the consumer may choose optional add ons at a premium the types of decisions to be made by a firm in this context are

conjoint analysis of price premiums for hotel amenities over the past decade or so conjoint analysis green and rao 1971 johnson 1974 appears to have become one of industry s most widely applied marketing research techniques for estimating consumer s multi attribute utility functions cattin and wittink 1982 however a continuing problem in application of conjoint analysis is how to handle the price attribute in the construction of stimulus profiles for presentation to respondents in many cases of practical interest the price level will be highly correlated with other product attribute levels if the researcher ignores this correlation by allowing the price levels to vary independently of other attributes the resulting profiles may appear sufficiently unrealistic to result in respondents discounting each profile s attractiveness thus reducing the validity of the results a related problem which adds to the complexity of new product pricing research is the bundling issue in the context of conjoint analysis the question is whether one can predict a respondent s evaluation of a bundle of product attributes and price as a simple linear function of the summed part worths of the entities making up the bundle when each entity is presented with its actual price metric hybrid conjoint models have received a fair amount of industry application to date the purpose of these models is to reduce data collection time while still retaining individual differences in part worth functions the present paper extends this class of models to include categorical conjoint analysis in which the criterion variable is classificatory this model is applied to an extremely large conjoint problem involving over 40 attributes and over 100 attribute levels the study results support the viability of the model for dealing with extremely large conjoint problems the study also shows evidence of the inability of simple functions of self explicated utilities for components of a bundle of hotel amenities to predict respondents preferences for the total bundle journal of business 1984 vol 57 no 1 pt 2 1984 by the university of chicago all rights reserved 0021 9398 84 5712 0019 0 1 50

anchoring effects on consumers willingness to pay and willingness to accept we examine the susceptibility of consumers willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta judgments to influence by arbitrary anchors the results of four studies suggest that although circumstantial differences between buying and selling decisions can lead to systematic differences in susceptibility to anchoring effects the principles governing the impact of anchoring on wtp and wta judgments are essentially the same in particular robust anchoring effects are observed when the anchor relates to the focal source of uncertainty further wtp and wta judgments are most susceptible to anchoring and endowment effects under uncertainty about the desire to trade the implications of this research for our understanding of anchoring and endowment effects are discussed

effects of seller supplied prices on buyers product evaluations reference prices in an internet auction context a field experiment investigated the impact of two external reference points under the seller s control on the final price of an auction when an item s seller specified a high external reference price a reserve price the final bid was greater than when the seller specified a low external reference price a minimum bid when the seller provided both high and low reference prices the reserve influenced the final bid more the low reference price led to a lower outcome compared to when the seller did not communicate any reference price the number of bidders influenced outcomes in the absence of seller supplied reference prices

add on pricing by asymmetric firms this paper uses an analytical model to examine the consequences of add on pricing when firms are both horizontally and vertically differentiated and there is a segment of boundedly rational consumers who are unaware of the add on fees at the time of initial purchase we find that consumers who know the add on fees can be penalized and increasingly so by the existence of boundedly rational consumers our consideration of quality asymmetries on base goods and add ons plus the inclusion of boundedly rational consumers leads to several novel findings regarding firm profits when quality asymmetry is on base goods only and with boundedly rational consumers add on pricing can diminish profit for a qualitatively superior firm and increase profit for an inferior firm i e a lose win result compared to when add on pricing is prohibited or infeasible when quality asymmetries exist on both base goods and add ons and without boundedly rational consumers the opposite win lose result prevails when quality asymmetries exist on both base goods and add ons and with boundedly rational consumers the result can be win win win lose or lose win depending on the magnitude of quality differentiation on add ons this paper was accepted by j miguel villas boas marketing

product complementarities capabilities and governance a dynamic transaction cost perspective the organization and governance of the transactions that comprise a bundling arrangement depend on the distribution of capabilities among firms and the amount of time during which the window of opportunity for earning rents is expected to remain open firms engaged in inter firm collaboration must undertake support transactions related to billing marketing customer support and product repair these support transactions differ from the core transactions that have traditionally been perceived as sufficient to provide a product bundle since support transactions create costs of their own the market may turn out to be an expensive means of governing collaborative arrangements undertaken for bundling purposes the telecommunications service sector provides an illustration copyright 1997 by oxford university press

a general choice model for bundles with multiple category products application to market segmentation and optimal pricing for bundles abstract the attribute based approach to study customer choices cannot deal with bundles of heterogeneous components which are usually drawn from different product categories the authors develop the comparability based balance model which is a unified framework for modeling bundle choices the model can be employed for any bundle regardless of the heterogeneity of bundle components under a pure bundling strategy the conjoint model and balance model are special cases of the general model the authors use mixture distributions in a hierarchical bayesian framework to incorporate consumer heterogeneity in a more flexible manner than the extant approaches such as latent class and random coefficient models the empirical tests of the model show that most attribute effects are significant and consistent with the model s predictions the model is superior to those that do not consider the issues of comparability of attributes latent class structure and heterogeneity among respondents the authors show how

an integrated product planning model for pricing and bundle selection using markov decision processes and data envelope analysis abstract when bundling products during the product planning stage there are a number of possible combinations that can be offered to customers consider a firm that offers n distinctive products then there are 2 n n 1 possible bundling combinations now if we wish to make pricing and bundle selection decisions keeping in my mind limited inventory and a finite time horizon then the size of the state space could be very large and finding an optimal solution could be impossible to tackle this issue we formulate an integrated model that utilizes a markov decision process and data envelope analysis bundle selections are made using data envelope analysis in each decision epoch once the efficient bundles are selected they are priced by solving a markov decision process using dynamic programming numerical examples are solved to exhibit the model s potential in solving real world problems

how buyers perceive savings in a bundle price an examination of a bundle s transaction value although bundling the selling of two or more products and or services at a single price has a history of economic research marketing oriented investigations have appeared only recently this pap

commodity bundling by single product monopolies consider two products that have independent demands in the sense that all individual buyers consider them neither substitutes nor complements then if the two products are priced separately the demand for either is independent of the price of the other in his classic analysis of block booking of feature films george stigler shows that it may be profitable for a monopoly seller of two such products to bundle them by requiring a buyer to take both in order to get either his work provides a rationale for tying arrangements that does not depend on technological or other dependencies among the products involved 2 adams and yellen extend the analysis of multiproduct monopoly with independent demands 3 they discuss two different bundling strategies pure bundling in which the seller only offers the products in fixed proportions and mixed bundling in which buyers may either buy the products separately or purchase a bundle with fixed proportions of each in this note i consider a single product monopoly and investigate the profit and welfare implications of bundling its product for some other

distortion of price discount perceptions the right digit effect we use four experiments to examine consumers processing of comparative regular and sale price information in advertisements consistent with our hypothesized right digit effect we find that when consumers view regular and sale prices with identical left digits they perceive larger price discounts when the right digits are small i e less than 5 than when they are large i e greater than 5 as a result they may attribute greater value and increased purchase likelihood to higher priced lower discounted items we examine alternate processing explanations for this right digit effect as well as the moderating impact of price presentation format

freight charge variations in truck transport markets price discrimination or competitive pricing it is well known that truck freight rates for different commodities over a given route vary and that rates per unit distance for the same commodity over different routes vary in previous studies this variation has been attributed to noncompetitive behavior in this paper a hypothesis that observed variations in truck rates are consistent with competitive behavior is tested using conjoint analysis trade offs between costs or rates and other attributes of transport service are estimated from experiments using panels of truck brokers and carriers the results are consistent with competitive behavior in the trucking industry

the effect of plausible and exaggerated reference prices on consumer perceptions and price search this article examines whether advertisers regular price claims affect consumer perceptions and price search behavior experiments involving simulated shopping via personal computers indicate that compared to an ad with no reference price an ad with a plausible reference price raised subjects estimates of the advertiser s regular price and the perceived offer value an exaggerated reference price had generally the same positive effects on perception as a plausible reference price even for the more skeptical subjects further when subjects were presented with an advertised sale price above the lowest expected price the exaggerated reference price increased the percentage of subjects who purchased the product from the advertiser without checking other stores prices

ceo incentives and firm size we develop a model that clarifies how to measure ceo incentive strength and how to reconcile the enormous differences in pay sensitivities between executives in large and small firms the crucial parameter is shown to be the elasticity of ceo productivity with respect to firm size we find that ceo marginal products rise significantly with firm size confirming rosen s conjecture that ceos of large firms have a chain letter effect on firm performance and overall ceo incentives are roughly constant or decline slightly with firm size we employ a multitask model to discuss implications for the design of control systems

a consumer perspective on price matching refund policies effect on price perceptions and search behavior although price matching refund policies are common in many retail environments the impact of such policies on consumers has largely been ignored this article reports the results of three studies that examine price matching policies from a consumer perspective study 1 shows that consumers perceive price matching policies as signals of low store prices and that the presence of a refund increases the likelihood of discontinuing price search contrary to the predictions based on signaling theory in information economics studies 2 and 3 show that when search costs are low the number of stores searched increases in the presence versus absence of a price matching policy when search costs are high consumers appear to accept the price matching signal at face value and search less in the presence of a refund the article concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of the findings and suggesting directions for future research

the effect of risk on the ceo market this article presents a market equilibrium model of ceo assignment pay and incentives under risk aversion and moral hazard each of the three outcomes can be summarized by a single closed form equation in the presence of moral hazard assignment is distorted from positive assortative matching on firm size as firms with higher risk or disutility choose less talented ceos such firms also pay higher salaries in the cross section but economywide increases in risk or the disutility of being a ceo do not affect pay the strength of incentives depends only on the disutility of effort and is independent of risk and risk aversion if the ceo can affect firm risk incentives rise and are increasing in risk and risk aversion we calibrate the losses from various forms of poor corporate governance such as failures in monitoring and inefficiencies in ceo assignment jel g34 j33 this article presents a market equilibrium model of ceo assignment pay and incentives risk averse managers of different talents are hired in a competitive market by heterogeneous firms which vary in their size risk and level of effort required the level of pay drives the assignment of talent to firms the strength of incentives induces the efficient effort level and is determined by an optimal contracting approach our main contribution is to incorporate risk into a ceo market equilibrium in a tractable manner a large empirical literature has shown that risk is a firstorder determinant of compensation contracts demsetz and lehn 1985 garen 1994 core and guay 1999 oyer and schaefer 2004 peters 2009 peters and wagner 2009 but most theories assume risk neutrality this assumption is

reframing the discount as a comparison against the sale price does it make the discount more attractive abstractsales induced through price promotions depend heavily on discount depth so firms create mechanisms to influence perceptions of discount depth typically consumers compute discount depth as the difference between the sale price and the original price with this difference compared against the original price but thus far no research has examined the effect of reframing this difference by comparing the discount depth against the sale price multiple studies including a field study across four grocery stores show that framing the discount depth by comparing it against the sale price increases consumers discount depth perceptions and thus increases purchase intentions as evidence of the underlying process the authors identify boundary conditions related to both individual differences numeracy and managerially relevant factors discount depth size in addition to contributing to research on price promotions behavioral pricing and numeric processing the article offers implications for both

can lenders discern managerial ability from luck evidence from bank loan contracts abstract we investigate the effect of managerial ability versus luck on bank loan contracting borrowers showing a persistently superior managerial ability over previous years more likely due to ability enjoy a lower loan spread while borrowers showing a temporary superior managerial ability more likely due to luck do not enjoy any spread reduction this finding suggests that banks can discern ability from luck when pricing a loan firms with high ability managers are more likely to continue their prior lower loan spread the spread reduction effect of managerial ability is stronger for firms with weak governance structures or poor stakeholder relationships corroborating the notion that better managerial ability alleviates borrowers agency and information risks we also find that well governed banks are better able to price governance into their borrowers loans which helps explain why good governance enhances bank value