IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/rje/bellje/v14y1983ispringp191-201.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Polymorphic Equilibrium in Advertising

Author

Listed:
  • William Hallagan
  • Wayne Joerding

Abstract

This article is concerned with the possibility that natural selection can lead to an evolutionarily stable equilibrium where otherwise identical profit maximizing firms follow distinctly different strategies. In biology such occurrences are called polymorphic equilibrium. We develop a model of nonprice competition and from this model two classes of polymorphic equilibria arise. In the first class, advertising by expanding market demand can create a niche large enough to sustain entry by nonadvertising firms. Thus, otherwise identical firms following advertising and no advertising strategies can coexist with equal profits in a polymorphic equilibrium The second class of polymorphic equilibria includes the case where advertising does not expand market demand and instead only affects market shares. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications that polymorphism has for empirical work in economics.

Suggested Citation

  • William Hallagan & Wayne Joerding, 1983. "Polymorphic Equilibrium in Advertising," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 14(1), pages 191-201, Spring.
  • Handle: RePEc:rje:bellje:v:14:y:1983:i:spring:p:191-201
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0361-915X%28198321%2914%3A1%3C191%3APEIA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T&origin=repec
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Not Only the Fittest Survive
      by Mark Thoma in Economist's View on 2011-03-28 12:24:00
    2. Loyalty Cards and Polymorphic Equilibria
      by Mark Thoma in Economist's View on 2008-05-16 15:33:00

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Matthew Sackett & Sherrill Shaffer, 2006. "Substitutes versus complements among credit risk management tools," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(14), pages 1007-1017.
    2. Victor Tremblay & Stephen Polasky, 2002. "Advertising with Subjective Horizontal and Vertical Product Differentiation," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 20(3), pages 253-265, May.
    3. Curry, Timothy J. & Rose, John T., 1997. "Thrift strategies after FIRREA: A cluster analysis of high-performance institutions," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 49(3), pages 223-238.
    4. Stivers, Andrew & Tremblay, Victor J., 2005. "Advertising, search costs, and social welfare," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 317-333, July.
    5. Shaffer, Sherrill, 2004. "Patterns of competition in banking," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 56(4), pages 287-313.
    6. Marc Rohde & Christoph Breuer, 2018. "Competing by investments or efficiency? Exploring financial and sporting efficiency of club ownership structures in European football," Sport Management Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(5), pages 563-581, December.
    7. Barton Lipman, 1986. "Cooperation among egoists in Prisoners' Dilemma and Chicken games," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 51(3), pages 315-331, January.

    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:rje:bellje:v:14:y:1983:i:spring:p:191-201. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.rje.org .

    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.