تجزیه و تحلیل ساختاری از رفتار رقابتی: روش تجربی جدید سازمان صنعتی در بازاریابی

The impact of a firm's strategic marketing mix choices on profitability can be evaluated by understanding the impact of those choices on consumer demand for the firm's products and on the firm's costs. Additionally, a firm's strategic marketing mix choices, and its demand and costs can be affected by rival firms' strategic choices. Therefore, to understand the effects of choice of marketing mix on profitability, we have to understand its effects on demand, cost and competitor reactions. The effects of choices of marketing mix on consumer demand have been analyzed in great depth in marketing, but research on the strategic reactions of competitors to such choices have been far more limited. The New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO) framework provides us with a source of methods that has potential to substantially add to our insights about competitive interactions among firms. In this paper, we first discuss a simple NEIO model to illustrate the basic methodology. We then discuss the contributions of this literature to our knowledge of competitive marketing strategy. In the process, we discuss methodological extensions of the basic model that are needed to model the institutional realities of specific markets. We also summarize how the existing literature has evolved, and provide our view of where the literature might profitably proceed from here. In particular, we discuss how future methodological innovations in the dynamics of competition, discrete strategy choice, and asymmetric information estimation will enable wider application of this methodology to competitive marketing strategy issues. The main advantage of NEIO studies is that they provide greater understanding of the competitive behavior in specific markets or industries compared to cross-sectional studies across industries. Bountiful opportunities exist for additional studies that focus on similar phenomena in different markets to draw generalizable conclusions from this line of research.

The impact of a firm's strategic marketing mix choices on profitability can be evaluated by understanding the impact of those choices on consumer demand for the firm's products and on the firm's costs. Additionally, a firm's strategic marketing mix choices, and its demand and costs can be affected by rival firms' strategic choices. Therefore, to understand the effects of choice of marketing mix on profitability, we have to understand its effects on demand, cost and competitor reactions. The effects of choices of marketing mix on consumer demand have been analyzed in great depth in marketing, but research on the strategic reactions of competitors to such choices have been far more limited. There is a rich tradition of empirical research in marketing strategy beginning in the 1950s that examines the impact of cost and competitive characteristics of a market on the profitability of firms. This empirical tradition following the structure–conduct–performance (hereafter referred to as SCP) paradigm of empirical industrial organization uses cross-sectional data across industries to find empirical regularities across industries. Many of these studies in marketing have used the Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies (PIMS) data (see Buzzell and Gale, 1987 for a survey). These studies have provided valuable insights about the empirical regularities of relationships between marketing mix choices like advertising, cost components including R&D etc., and profits of firms. Beginning in the late seventies, advances in game theory have led to a large amount of theoretical research analyzing strategic issues in the context of competition between firms, firms and channel members, firms and their advertising agencies, etc. (For a review, see Moorthy, 1993.) This research convinced empirical researchers that market outcomes (i.e., firms' strategic marketing mix choices and the resulting sales, etc.) and profitability are not merely a function of the broad structural characteristics used in SCP studies. Rather, these market outcomes and profitability are affected by specific industry and firm specific demand and cost characteristics that are difficult to model within the SCP framework of cross-industry analysis. A consequence of these insights has been the birth of the “New Empirical Industrial Organization” literature (henceforth referred to as NEIO; for a review see Bresnahan, 1989). This literature incorporates more industry- and firm-specific details in modeling demand, cost, and competition as steps in analyzing the relationship between marketing mix and profits. Therefore, this approach should be seen as the next step in the stream of empirical research in marketing strategy after the SCP literature. The goal of this paper is to review this literature and provide an agenda for future work.

Structural models in the NEIO framework provide estimates of, and insights about, the underlying competitive game, demand and cost structures for a specific industry. We have argued in this paper that they are therefore extremely useful for managerial decision-making, and specifically, for marketing mix decisions. As we stated in the introduction, there are several benefits to estimating NEIO structural models. A major benefit of structural NEIO estimation is that it enables theory testing. Game theory offers competing theories under different assumptions leading to different predictions. For example, Green and Porter (1984) suggest a theory of dynamic competitive behavior that suggests procyclical behavior, i.e., prices rise during periods of high demand of a market and fall during periods of low demand for a market. Rotemberg and Saloner (1986) in contrast develop a theory that predicts countercyclical behavior. Ratomberg and Saloner use estimates of competitive behavior from Porter (1983) to show that the railroad cartels of the 1880s behaved in a manner consistent with procyclical pricing implications. Bresnahan (1987) shows that the auto market behaves consistently with the procyclical prediction of Rotemberg and Saloner. NEIO research can thus serve to judge the appropriateness of theories. An issue with such theory testing is that while the tests are based on structurally rich and industry-specific studies, it is not clear whether and how these findings can be generalized. We have argued previously that managers care both about strategic generalizations across industries and strategic specifics of their industry. There are several studies that combine the methodology of NEIO and yet study several closely related markets. For example, Parker and Roller (1997) and Nevo (2001a) analyze firm behavior in the cellular telephone and breakfast cereal markets, respectively, across multiple geographical markets within the United States. Verboven (1996) analyzes price discrimination behavior in different countries of the European car market. Sudhir (2001a) analyzes multiple segments of the US auto market to infer differences in competitive behavior across different segments. The studies across closely related markets analyze how similar firms adapt their behavior in different markets to account for the variations in structural characteristics of these markets.