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A NOTE ON PRICING OF PRODUCT QUALITY FOR STATUS CONCERNS
Author(s) -
Choi Kangsik
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
bulletin of economic research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.227
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 1467-8586
pISSN - 0307-3378
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8586.2012.00449.x
Subject(s) - incentive , quality (philosophy) , profit (economics) , product (mathematics) , microeconomics , value (mathematics) , economics , business , marketing , industrial organization , mathematics , statistics , philosophy , geometry , epistemology
The paper analyses the optimal pricing of the product quality scheme when concerns for relative standing exist among consumers. We demonstrate that if the proportion of high‐value consumers is over (respectively, under) 1/2 of the total consumers, a firm has an incentive to select a large (respectively, small) quality gap among products. Therefore, there exists a cut‐off level for status concerns, which eliminates quality differences, and the firm assigns the same quality to all the consumers. These results indicate that consumers’ qualities will reflect distortions at the top and bottom. Accordingly, the firm's profit depends on which consumer category is larger.