A Dynamic Pricing Game Investigating The Interaction Of Price And Quality On Sales Response

Abstract

There is some question as to whether or not consumers use price as an indicator of product quality. In the case of non-durable goods there is some evidence that consumers do equate higher price products with higher quality products. These products are those that the consumer must experience personally before making a judgment on the product quality. In the case of durable goods there is less empirical evidence to support the price-quality connection. This paper develops a dynamic game model to investigate the price-quality connection in the presence of competition.  Specifically, the paper investigates whether or not the optimal pricing strategy in the case of a durable good, where consumers may collect quality information about the product as units diffuse into the market, should be a high quality-high price strategy or a high quality-low price strategy. This question is examined by means of a dynamic game model, which is an extension of the Narasimhan-Ghosh-Mendez (NGM) quality diffusion model. The paper explicitly incorporates competition into the NGM model. Price trajectories for two competing firms are derived so that profits are maximized for the two competitors. It is shown that the price trajectory for the firm using quality as a strategic lever is shown to be lower than that of the firm that was not using a quality strategy. This result strongly suggests that a firm pursuing a quality strategy should couple this strategy with a lower price than its competition and should not couple high prices with high quality in an effort to signal the product’s superior quality to consumers.