Price Matching by Vertically Differentiated Retailers: Theory and Evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines vertically differentiated retailers' incentives to offer price-matching guarantees. It suggests that offering and not offering a price-matching guarantee are both signals of a retailer's service-price profile, a way of branding the retailer to uninformed consumers. The signals are made credible and costless by the presence of informed consumers. The authors show that when the service differentiation is large enough, only low-service retailers offer price-matching guarantees. Data from a sample of Canadian retail chains support this prediction. In addition, larger retail chains are more likely to offer price-matching guarantees than smaller chains, and competition has an interactive effect with service. As the intensity of competition a chain faces increases, lower-service retailers are even more likely to use a guarantee, and higher-service retailers are less likely to do so, suggesting that price-matching guarantees are competitive tools, not collusive tools, as the literature has often implied.
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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 | 0.034 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".