Competition in Marketing

The importance of information to support managerial decision making has been widely acknowledged, but only little research has been done on the overall impact of such information. In her first essay Vera Magin uses primary experimental data to explore the effects of information on marketing decisions, performance, and competition. The results indicate that better informed firms offer more products, achieve a higher primary demand, and exhaust customer preferences to a higher degree. Surprisingly and more importantly, information impacts on performance are non-significant. This phenomenon is termed "managerial over-acting". Managerial over-acting introduces a new concept to the marketing discipline.


The degree of product differentiation of a market is reflective of its competitive intensity. For the case of spatial markets, however, the marketing discipline does not provide a valid measure of product differentiation. In her second essay the author discusses several approaches to measure product differentiation in spatial contexts. In doing so, she refers to the measurement of diversity and also applies methods from disciplines like spatial statistics, forestry, and geography.