tailieunhanh - Information Gathering and Marketing

Consumers have only partial knowledge before making a purchase decision, but can choose to acquire more-detailed information. A rm can make it easier or harder for these consumers to obtain such information. We explore consumers information gathering and the rm s inte- grated strategy for marketing, pricing, and investment in ensuring quality. In particular, we highlight that when consumers are ex-ante heterogeneous, the rm might choose an intermedi- ate marketing strategy for two quite di¤erent reasons. First, it serves as a non-price means of discrimination it can make information only partially available, in a way that induces some, but not all, consumers to acquire the information. Second, when the. | Information Gathering and Marketing1 Heski Bar-Isaac Guillermo Caruana Vicente Cunat NYU CEMFI LSE January 2009 Abstract Consumers have only partial knowledge before making a purchase decision but can choose to acquire more-detailed information. A firm can make it easier or harder for these consumers to obtain such information. We explore consumers information gathering and the firm s integrated strategy for marketing pricing and investment in ensuring quality. In particular we highlight that when consumers are ex-ante heterogeneous the firm might choose an intermediate marketing strategy for two quite different reasons. First it serves as a non-price means of discrimination it can make information only partially available in a way that induces some but not all consumers to acquire the information. Second when the firm cannot commit to a given investment in ensuring quality it can still convince all consumers of its provision by designing a pricing and marketing policy that induces some consumers to actively gather further information. This mass of consumers is sufficiently large to discipline the monopolist to invest. JEL D42 D83 L15 M31 Keywords information gathering monopoly marketing pricing investment 1We thank the co-editor two anonymous referees participants at EARIE 2007 Valencia Haas School of Business Berkeley IIOC 2007 Savannah LSE Michigan State University Oxford Stern Marketing lunch Stern Micro lunch University of Sydney Utah Winter B usiness Economics Conference Workshop on the Economics of Advertising and M arketing Bad Homburg Simon Anderson Simon Board Jim Dana Andrew D aughety Hao Li Regis Renault and particularly Yuk-Fai Fong and Monic Jiayin Sun for detailed and helpful comments. Guillermo C aruana acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 Project Consolidating Economics. Contact info Bar-Isaac heski@ Department of Economics Stern School of Business NYU 44 .