文档介绍：标题:Chain-petition: Customized vs. Uniform Pricing
原文:1. Introduction
Different retail locations have different costs and, what is our concern here, different degrees petition. For example, wage levels may vary by location and a particular market player may face petitors in some locations than others. Hence, we might expect prices to be customized across locations. As an illustration, take the milestone antitrust investigation by the US Federal mission of the proposed Staples/Office Depot merger. Here, a key element the FTC uncovered was the adoption of markedly differing pricing practices across locations of petitive intensity, with a clear link between the number peting stores of similar type and the level of price. This is third degree price discrimination, but in an oligopoly context 。
monly held view is that firms are better off practicing this form of price discrimination between locations of petitive intensity. Against this view, Cortes (1998) and other subsequent authors have shown that in situations of “best response asymmetry”, where one player’s strong market is the other’s weak market, firms can be worse off practicing price discrimination. As Cortes puts it, “… if firms differ in which markets they target for this aggressive pricing petitive
reactions are strong, prices in all markets may fall.”。 But in most retailing situations, such as office equipment supplies, rival firms will hold the same opinion about which market is strong and which is weak as a result of differing degrees petition – a situation of best response symmetry rather than asymmetry.
Under these circumstances, a clear puzzle is why in some prominent cases of best response symmetry, in distinction to Staples/Office Depot, firms practice uniform pricing rather than varying price by location. It is this puzzle that is the focus of our paper. As we document in detail below, the key players in the United Kingdom (“UK”) supermarket industry, which has a turnover over five times as large