Competition in Marketing: Two Essays on the Impact of Information on Managerial Decisions and on Spatial Product Differentiation

ISBN-13: 9783835004320 / Angielski / Miękka / 2006 / 145 str.

Vera Magin; Prof Dr Oliver P. Heil

Opis

The first portion of Dr. Magin' s dissertation research focuses on the impact of demand related information on marketing activity. More precisely, Dr. Magin addresses important questions such as the degree to which firms equipped with demand-related information (DRI) introduce more products, satisfy consumers better, and, most fundamentally, make more money than firms without such DRI. This portion of Dr. Magin's dissertation work involves condensing the broad extant knowledge pertaining to marketing information and creating new hypotheses, empirically testing these hypotheses, and linking results to managerial practice as well as linking the findings to research opportunities. In addition to this, Dr. Magin's dissertation research entails a more theoretical and quantitative portion that addresses the problem of product differentiation. Here, she immerses herself into the areas of distance functions, distance measures, and spatial product differentiation. This portion of her dissertation is more quantitative and theoretical. In the first portion of her dissertation, Dr. Magin augments extant knowledge from economics, game theory, decision research, and social psychology into a sizeable set of hypotheses. To empirically test these hypotheses, she makes a large effort to collect primary data. More precisely, she uses a complex market simulation to conduct experiments through the course of three full years. Next, she tests her hypotheses using a variety of conservative tests. Her results are very interesting as she finds much support for the linkages she hypothesized.

Spis treści

Essay I: Managerial Over-Acting: literature on information and over-action; information impacts; empirical investigation using the simulation 'SINTO market'; conclusions Essay II: Spatial Product Differentiation: on the concept of product differentiation; product differentiation in a multidimensional characteristics space; measuring product differentiation, conclusion

O autorze

Dr. Vera Magin promovierte bei Univ.-Prof. Dr. Oliver P. Heil am Lehrstuhl für Marketing der Universität Mainz. Sie forschte zudem als Research Scholar an der University of Florida, Gainesville (USA). Ihre Dissertation wurde von Nobelpreisträger Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Reinhard Selten als Zweitgutachter betreut.

Blurb

The importance of information to support managerial decision making has been widely acknowledged, but only little research has been done on the overall impact of such information. In her first essay Vera Magin uses primary experimental data to explore the effects of information on marketing decisions, performance, and competition. The results indicate that better informed firms offer more products, achieve a higher primary demand, and exhaust customer preferences to a higher degree. Surprisingly and more importantly, information impacts on performance are non-significant. This phenomenon is termed "managerial over-acting". Managerial over-acting introduces a new concept to the marketing discipline.

The degree of product differentiation of a market is reflective of its competitive intensity. For the case of spatial markets, however, the marketing discipline does not provide a valid measure of product differentiation. In her second essay the author discusses several approaches to measure product differentiation in spatial contexts. In doing so, she refers to the measurement of diversity and also applies methods from disciplines like spatial statistics, forestry, and geography.