IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecinqu/v30y1992i3p418-36.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Buyer's Strategies, Entry Barriers, and Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Scheffman, David T
  • Spiller, Pablo T

Abstract

In markets where sellers have customer-specific investments, and buyers can make credible, but costly, commitments to switch suppliers, buyers' strategies attenuate the market power of sellers. Furthermore, since current prices and a buyer's decision to switch suppliers are related, limit pricing becomes an equilibrium. Limit prices increase with the time it takes a buyer to switch suppliers and with buyers' switching costs, but fall with the level of sunk investments. Thus, sunk investments may restrain the sellers' ability to exert market power. The paper questions, then, the standard inverse relationship between market performance and sunk investments. Copyright 1992 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Scheffman, David T & Spiller, Pablo T, 1992. "Buyer's Strategies, Entry Barriers, and Competition," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 30(3), pages 418-436, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:30:y:1992:i:3:p:418-36
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrew Kleit, 2001. "Creating a Public Good to Fight Monopolization: The Formation of Broadcast Music, Inc," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 19(2), pages 243-256, September.
    2. Jeon, Doh-Shin & Menicucci, Domenico, 2014. "Buyer Group and Buyer Power When Sellers Compete," TSE Working Papers 14-543, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), revised Nov 2017.
    3. Hans-Theo Normann & Bradley J. Ruffle & Christopher M. Snyder, 2007. "Do buyer-size discounts depend on the curvature of the surplus function? Experimental tests of bargaining models," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 38(3), pages 747-767, September.
    4. Pio Baake & Vanessa Schlippenbach, 2011. "Quality distortions in vertical relations," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 103(2), pages 149-169, June.
    5. Nestor Duch-Brown, 2017. "Platforms to business relations in online platform ecosystems," JRC Working Papers on Digital Economy 2017-07, Joint Research Centre.
    6. Ping Wang & Alison Watts, 2006. "Formation of buyer‐seller trade networks in a quality‐differentiated product market," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 39(3), pages 971-1004, August.
    7. Sara Fisher Ellison & Christopher M. Snyder, 2010. "Countervailing Power In Wholesale Pharmaceuticals," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(1), pages 32-53, March.
    8. Hans Degryse & Steven Ongena, 2002. "Bank-Firm Relationships and International Banking Markets," International Journal of the Economics of Business, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(3), pages 401-417.
    9. Vanessa von Schlippenbach & Isabel Teichmann, 2012. "The Strategic Use of Private Quality Standards in Food Supply Chains," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1189-1201.
    10. Dennis Rickert & Jan Philip Schain & Joel Stiebale, 2021. "Local Market Structure and Consumer Prices: Evidence from a Retail Merger," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 69(3), pages 692-729, September.
    11. Rachel E. Kranton & Deborah F. Minehart, 2001. "A Theory of Buyer-Seller Networks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(3), pages 485-508, June.
    12. Stephane Caprice & Shiva Shekhar, 2019. "Negative market value and loss leading," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 39(1), pages 94-103.
    13. Stéphane Caprice & Patrick Rey, 2015. "Buyer Power from Joint Listing Decision," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 125(589), pages 1677-1704, December.
    14. Inderst, Roman & Wey, Christian, 2007. "Buyer power and supplier incentives," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 647-667, April.
    15. Fabra, Natalia & Reguant, Mar, 2020. "A model of search with price discrimination," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    16. David Mills, 2013. "Countervailing Power and Chain Stores," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 42(3), pages 281-295, May.
    17. Alderighi, Marco, 2007. "The role of buying consortia among SMEs in the electricity market in Italy," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 3463-3472, June.
    18. Jeon, Doh-Shin & Menicucci, Domenico, 2019. "On the unprofitability of buyer groups when sellers compete," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 265-288.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:30:y:1992:i:3:p:418-36. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.