Title
Suppliers’ competition and manufacturer’s product mix: the role of ingredient brand
Abstract
This paper proposes a pricing game among a manufacturer and two competing suppliers. One of the suppliers establishes an ingredient brand, which can enhance the valuations of the end products. The equilibrium is derived to investigate the impact of the ingredient brand awareness and the production costs on the suppliers’ pricing competition, the manufacturer’s product mix and retail price(s), and profits. The result shows that the manufacturer may provide unique product or differentiated products, depending on the effectiveness of ingredient branding strategy. We distinguish two different monopolistic scenarios in supplier market and provide the condition for each supplier to survive. We find that the ingredient branding strategy mitigates the pricing competition between suppliers and benefits the manufacturer in a low production cost industry.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/s10288-015-0291-x
A Quarterly Journal of Operations Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Ingredient branding, Brand awareness, Product mix, Pricing, Supply chain, Game theory, 91A80
Mathematical optimization,Ingredient branding,Corporate branding,Ingredient,Supply chain,Monopolistic competition,Industrial organization,Brand management,Brand awareness,Mathematics,Product differentiation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
3
1614-2411
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
2
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ting Zhang190.96
Qinglong Gou2275.04
Liang Liang39312.93