Résumé
Retailers often stock items that are only slightly differentiated from others??differ- ent sizes of a popular brand, or different ?avors in a common product line for instance. We argue that this practice is a form of strategic obfuscation, intended to raise con- sumer search costs, and margins on non-comparable products. We test our hypothesis using examples from several product categories in German and French retail scanner data. We ?nd that, after controlling for other explanations for how margins can vary with package size, we cannot rule out strategic obfuscation as a feature of our retail sales data.
Mots-clés
differentiation; price discrimination; retail pricing; search model; strategic obfuscation;
Codes JEL
- D43: Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
- L13: Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
- M31: Marketing
Remplacé par
Timothy J. Richards, Gordon Klein, Céline Bonnet et Zohra Bouamra-Mechemache, « Strategic Obfuscation and Retail Pricing », Review of Industrial Organization, vol. 57, décembre 2020, p. 859–889.
Référence
Céline Bonnet, Zohra Bouamra-Mechemache, Gordon Klein et Timothy J. Richards, « Strategic Obfuscation and Retail Pricing », TSE Working Paper, n° 16-733, novembre 2016.
Voir aussi
Publié dans
TSE Working Paper, n° 16-733, novembre 2016