Consideration Sets and Competitive Marketing

We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision problem. They apply well-defined preferences to a “consideration set”, which is a function of the marketing devices employed by the firms. We examine the implications of this behavioural model in the context of a competitive market model, particularly on industry profits, vertical product differentiation, the use of marketing devices, and consumers’ conversion rates.