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Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence

Author

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  • Hyunjin Kim

    (Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163)

  • Michael Luca

    (Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163)

Abstract

Dominant platform businesses often develop products in adjacent markets to complement their core business. One common approach used to gain traction in these adjacent markets has been to pursue a tying strategy. For example, Microsoft preinstalled Internet Explorer into Windows, and Apple set Apple Maps as the iOS default. Policymakers have raised concerns that dominant platforms may be leveraging their market power to gain traction for lower quality products when they use a tying strategy. In this paper, we empirically explore this question by examining Google’s decision to tie its new reviews product to its search engine. We experimentally vary the reviews displayed above Google’s organic search results to show either exclusively Google reviews (Google’s current tying strategy) or reviews from multiple platforms determined to be the best-performing by Google’s own organic search algorithm. We find that users prefer the version that does not exclude competitor reviews. Furthermore, looking at observational data on user traffic to Yelp from search engines, we find that Google’s exclusion of downstream competitors may have been effective. The share of Yelp’s traffic coming from Google has declined over this period, relative to traffic from Bing and Yahoo (which do not exclude other companies’ reviews), and Google reviews has grown more quickly than Yelp and TripAdvisor during the period in which they excluded these (and other) reviews providers. Overall, these results suggest that tying has the potential to facilitate entry in complementary markets even when the tied product is of worse quality than competitors.

Suggested Citation

  • Hyunjin Kim & Michael Luca, 2019. "Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(2), pages 596-603, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:65:y:2019:i:2:p:596-603
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2018.3246
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    Cited by:

    1. Graham Beattie & Ruben Durante & Brian Knight & Ananya Sen, 2021. "Advertising Spending and Media Bias: Evidence from News Coverage of Car Safety Recalls," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(2), pages 698-719, February.
    2. Fabien Curto Millet & Stephen Lewis & Paul Stoddart, 2022. "Local Search Quality: Comment on “Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence”," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(4), pages 3169-3174, April.

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