Pricing To Signal Product Line Quality

Consumer Preferences and Product-line Pricing Strategies: An Empirical Analysis

Firms often differentiate their product lines vertically to capture consumers’ differential willingness to pay for quality. Additionally, many firms offer products varying not in quality but in characteristics such as scent, color, or flavor that relate to horizontal differentiation. For example, in the yogurt category, each manufacturer carries several product lines differing in quality and pr...

Product Line Pricing in a Vertically Differentiated Oligopoly∗

This paper empirically examines the joint pricing decision of products in a firm’s product line. When products are distinguished by a vertical characteristic, those products with higher values of that characteristic will command higher prices. We investigate whether, holding the value of the characteristic constant, there is a price premium for products on the industry and/or the firm frontier,...

Can Brand Extension Signal Product Quality?

This paper asks whether brand extension can serve as a signal of product quality given that it costs less than a new brand. (Existing literature has assumed either that brand extension is cost-neutral or that it costs more.) I show that it can as a Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium, but the argument is unconvincing. For one thing, the separating equilibrium is not unique; a pooling equilibrium also ...

Managing quality in Product Line Engineering

Quality-Oriented Software Product Line Architecture Design

Software architecture design is a critical step of software development. Currently, there are various design methods available and each is focusing on certain perspective of architecture design. Especially, quality-based methods have received a lot of attentions and have been well developed for single system architecture design. However, the use of quality-based design methods is limited in sof...