Quality competition between national and store brands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The private label literature assumes that store brands (SBs) are of lower quality than competing national brands (NBs). To contest this notion, this paper examines the quality competition between a NB manufacturer and a SB retailer. The NB manufacturer sells its products through the retailer, and hence the manufacturer and the retailer are in competition. Once both parties decide the right quality level of their respective products, the retailer decides the retail prices for both brands. Using a general quality-dependent cost structure, we explicitly characterise both the price- and quality-level equilibriums under various channel power structures. We find that the SB might have a higher quality level than the NB even with no cost disparity, but will have a lower retail price than the NB, whether its quality is superior or not. Further, price and quality competitions have opposite implications for equilibrium solutions as well as profitability levels. Interestingly, the manufacturer may benefit from a more costly production or quality investment scenario, although both the retailer and the supply chain may suffer from it. The paper highlights the importance of accountability for quality decisions in the study of private label products.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".