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Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Game Theory in Action

With the Christmas shopping season coming up, I'm sure everyone's noticed businesses promising price matching guarantees, some even offering to beat a competitor's price by 10-20%.  Theses are sneaky little promises that not only are intended to attract customers, but serve as a threat to other businesses to not drop their prices.

Usually you see these promises from large companies in industries where there are few competitors, called an oligopoly.  The fact that the companies are talking about price change proves that they are not in a perfectly competitive market because in such everyone would accept the market price for the good; no one has the power to change their price without being under cut by the entire industry and being forced out of business.  But since oligopolies have a little market power, they can mess with the price and quantity a little and extract monopoly prices. 

Now, when there are very few companies in an industry, it is easier for them to (illegally) collude, i.e. talk to each other and agree to price their goods higher than normal, earning them more money.  Sometimes businesses don't have to explicitly communicate but rather see each other's prices and gauge their own off of those.  When the whole industry charges higher prices, especially for goods that we can't seem to do without, the suppliers in that industry make a lot more money.  If they sold their goods at lower prices, they'd make less money, and who wants less money??

The guarantees come in to play as a way to keep everyone selling at a higher price.  For instance, Lowes promises to beat any competitor's (Home Depot) price by 10% (as previously linked).  This means that if Home Depot wanted to sale grills at more of a market price (while Lowes was still charging a higher price, therefore stealing business from Lowes and earning tons of extra profit), Lowes would drop to below the new Home Depot price, thereby stealing their customers and putting a major hurt on their competitor.  Neither company would come out ahead in this situation, but Lowes would be minimizing the harm to its business while punishing their competitor for not charging the mutually beneficial higher prices.

You can go into tons of detail on this subject, known as game theory (Industrial Organization, an economics course, focuses on this. Check it out if you're an economics major!).  For the purposes of this website, it is just important to know that oligopolies that are colluding charge a higher that normal price and earn extra profit.  However, there's always an incentive to charge a lower price than your competitors and earn even more profit.  These price guarantees, however, serve as a threat to one another, promising to take down the high-price agreement and drive the industry into market-dictated lower prices with lower profits if one of the companies defect. Its an ingenious idea, offered as a promise of low prices to the consumer but as a promise of high prices to other businesses. Whoever thought up this idea definitely got paid well (and that's why you major in economics :) )

-Brandon

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