Vertical Product Differentiation When Quality Is Unobservable To Buyers

Author : Brandon James Hoffman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (11 download)

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Download or read book Modeling Vertical Markets of Differentiated Goods written by Brandon James Hoffman and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of essays on the topic of vertical markets and resellers. The first two chapters look at the effects of mandatory dealer laws on prices and profits in vertical markets with differentiated goods. The third chapter looks at the quality of products chosen when manufacturers use resellers compared to when they do not. All three chapters show that competition is lessened when mandatory dealer laws exist. Chapter 1 addresses the US automobile market which has laws in almost every state that require sales of new vehicles go through franchised dealers, and manufacturers are not allowed to sell directly to consumers. While vertical markets can provide many benefits to both producer and consumer alike, double-marginalization is often seen as a problem for producers and consumers with vertical markets; whereby firms on different levels both have market power and thus are both able to charge a markup over cost. Contracts and implicit agreements can mitigate or lessen the negative externality associated with double-marginalization, but I develop a model to show that double-marginalization can be a good thing for producers, while simultaneously being bad for consumers. The model has a single dimension on product differentiation and different levels of vertical markets. In this model, firms either sell to consumers or other firms. How far removed the manufacturer of the good is from the final consumer determines the number of vertical markets. A market with one level consists of a manufacturer who sells directly to consumers, while a market with two levels consists of a manufacturer who sells to a reseller who in turn sells to consumers. I find that the profits of the manufacturer of the good can be up to three times as high when there are two levels instead of one and that they will always be at least twice as high. This model also shows that manufacturers can benefit from the existence of a law that requires they use dealers, even though any one single manufacturer has an incentive to not use a dealer. Chapter 2 addresses mandatory dealer laws in a setting without perfectly inelastic demand. Under a certain set of circumstances, manufacturers can earn higher profits after the introduction of these mandatory dealer laws than they would be without them. In this chapter, I remove the perfectly inelastic total demand restriction, and instead show how the elasticity of total demand plays a role in a manufacturer's preference for a mandatory dealer law. For the model used in this paper, I find that total demand does not need to be very inelastic at all, and in fact, can be elastic at the equilibrium prices and quantities. The findings in this paper run contrary to expectation, where double-marginalization is something that hurts manufacture's profits. In chapter 3, I analyze the benefit of moving first in a vertically differentiated market with manufacturers and retailers. Both retailers and manufactures are assumed to be profit-maximizing entities. Here the choice of the incumbent manufacturer creates an indifference between entering with a higher quality or entering with a lower quality for the entering manufacturer. Entry-quality decisions and wholesale pricing are related to the competition of retailers selling the manufacturers product and the degree of consumers' taste for quality. I examine the indifference of the entering manufacturer and highlight the benefits of being able to set quality first as an incumbent manufacturer when pricing stages are simultaneous. Stackelberg competition in the quality stage allows for the possibility for inferior-quality entry as well as superior-quality entry. The first-mover advantage dominates the high-quality advantage in this setting which is consistent with my findings in the dock and boat-lift markets.