Competitive Price-Matching Guarantees: Equilibrium Analysis of the Availability Verification Clause Under Demand Uncertainty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Price-matching guarantees involve a retailer matching the lower price of a competitor for an identical product. In reality, retailers often make such guarantees contingent on the verification of product availability at the competitor's location, and decline a price-match request if the product is not available there. This creates certain consternation on the part of customers. In this paper, we investigate the availability contingency strategy from the perspectives of both the retailers and the customers. Our analysis shows that availability contingency clauses intensify inventory competition between retailers and reinstitutes price competition, which is otherwise eliminated by unconditional price-matching guarantees. Consequently, despite what customers may think about the availability verification, it actually increases their surplus. On the other hand, such a clause reduces profits and, hence, is not the equilibrium strategy for retailers. Subsequently, we discuss how a likely customer behaviour pattern may be a plausible explanation regarding the use of the clause by the retailers in practice. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".