Group Selling, Product Durability, and Consumer Behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Firms producing complementary goods often strategically form groups and jointly sell their products to better coordinate their decisions. For consumer durables, decisions about such collaboration might be complicated due to two factors. Because of their durability and presence of used goods markets, such products engender “future” price competition between new and used goods. On the other hand, consumers of such products might be forward‐looking and patient, both of which affect their purchasing behavior. In this study, we study how the above product and consumer characteristics interact to affect the group selling decisions of complementary firms. We do so through a two‐period model consisting of a value chain with two upstream manufacturers and a downstream retailer. When consumers are relatively impatient and reluctant to wait to buy later, group selling by manufacturers will take place only when the end product is relatively perishable, that is, product durability is low. However, if consumers are patient, that is, willing to wait, collaboration happens only when the end product is quite durable; for relatively perishable products the manufacturers sell their products separately. We also comment on how our results are affected by factors like manufacturers directly selling to end consumers or there being multiple opportunities to decide whether or not to use group selling strategy.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".