Implications of Competitor Representation for Profit-Maximizing Design

Design optimization studies that model competition with other products in the market often use a small set of products to represent all competitors. We investigate the effect of competitor product representation on profit-maximizing design solutions. Specifically, we study the implications of replacing a large set of disaggregated elemental competitor products with a subset of competitor products or composite products. We derive first-order optimality conditions and show that optimal design (but not price) is independent of competitors when using logit and nested logit models (where preferences are homogeneous). However, this relationship differs in the case of random-coefficients logit models (where preferences are heterogeneous), and we demonstrate that profit-maximizing design solutions using latent-class or mixed-logit models can (but need not always) depend on the representation of competing products. We discuss factors that affect the magnitude of the difference between models with elemental and composite representations of competitors, including preference heterogeneity, cost function curvature, and competitor set specification. We present correction factors that ensure models using subsets or composite representation of competitors have optimal design solutions that match those of disaggregated elemental models. While optimal designs using logit and nested logit models are not affected by ad-hoc modeling decisions of competitor representation, the independence of optimal designs from competitors when using these models raises questions of when these models are appropriate to use.