A note on the low‐quality advantage in vertical product differentiation

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-179
Author(s):  
Le Duc Niem
Author(s):  
Marc Baudry ◽  
Adrien Hervouet

AbstractThis article deals with the impact of legal rules on incentives in the seeds sector to create new plant varieties. The first category of rules consists in intellectual property rights and is intended to address a problem of sequential innovation and R&D effort. The second category concerns commercial rules that are intended to correct a problem of adverse selection. We propose a dynamic model of market equilibrium with vertical product differentiation that enables us to take into account the economic consequences of imposing either Plant Breeders’ Rights (PBRs) or patents as IPRs and either compulsory registration in a catalog or minimum standards as commercialization rules. The main result is that the combination of catalog registration and PBRs adopted in Europe is hardly supported by the model calibrated on data for wheat in France.


2011 ◽  
Vol 474-476 ◽  
pp. 2325-2328
Author(s):  
Ying Sheng Su ◽  
Jian Fu Li ◽  
Jiang Wu ◽  
Peng Fei Ji

Different consumer demands different quality, which determines that existence of different quality of the same product is reasonable. The article uses two-stage game of fully non-perfect information. Through two-stage game analysis, the article concludes that whether new entrants should enter the market is not only related with the fixed cost of entry, the number of consumers and the highest taste of consumers, but also related to the quality choices of incumbents; after entrants enter the market, the choices of quality are decided by the quality choices of incumbents.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Illtae Ahn ◽  
Kiho Yoon

Abstract We examine mixed bundling in a competitive environment that incorporates vertical product differentiation. We show that, compared to the equilibrium without bundling, (i) prices, profits and social welfare are lower, whereas (ii) consumer surplus is higher in the equilibrium with mixed bundling. In addition, the population of consumers who purchase both products from the same firm is larger in the equilibrium with mixed bundling. These results are largely in line with those obtained in the previous literature on competitive mixed bundling with horizontal differentiation. Further, we conduct a comparative static analysis with respect to changes in quality differentiation parameters. When the quality gap between brands narrows under no bundling and symmetric mixed bundling, prices and profits decrease. When quality differentiation is asymmetric across products, however, complicated effects occur on prices and profits due to strategic interdependence that mixed bundling creates.


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