IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ste/nystbu/94-16.html

The Max-Min Principle of Product Differentiation

Author

Listed:
  • Nicholas Economides
  • Asim Ansari
  • Joel Steckel

Abstract

We analyze two- and three-dimensional variants of Hotelling's model of differentiated products. In our setup, consumers can place different importance on each product attribute; this is measured by a weight in the disutility of distance in each dimension. Two firms play a two-stage game; they choose locations in stage 1 and prices in stage 2. We seek subgame- perfect equilibria. We find that all such equilibria have maximal differentiation in one dimension only; in all other dimensions, they have minimum differentiation. An equilibrium with maximal differentiation in a certain dimension occurs when consumers place sufficient importance (weight) on that attribute. Thus, depending on the importance consumers place on each attribute, in two dimensions there is a "max-min" equilibrium, a "min - max" equilibrium, or both. In three dimensions, depending on the weights, there can be a "max-min-min" equilibrium, a "min-max- min" equilibrium, a "min-min- max" equilibrium, any two of them, or all three.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Nicholas Economides & Asim Ansari & Joel Steckel, 1994. "The Max-Min Principle of Product Differentiation," Working Papers 94-16, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ste:nystbu:94-16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dos Santos Ferreira, Rodolphe & Thisse, Jacques-Francois, 1996. "Horizontal and vertical differentiation: The Launhardt model," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 14(4), pages 485-506, June.
    2. Andrea Mangani & Paolo Patelli, 2002. "The Max-Min Principle of Product Differentiation: An Experimental Analysis," LEM Papers Series 2002/05, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    3. Stefan Roth, 1999. "Möglichkeiten und Grenzen ökonomischer Positionierungsmodelle," Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research, Springer, vol. 51(3), pages 243-266, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ste:nystbu:94-16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amanda Murphy The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Amanda Murphy to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ednyuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.