수직적 차별화 시장에서 진입기업의 서비스 다양화와 품질전략

Firms often design product or service lines by segmenting their market on quality attribute. This paper examines the firms’ optimal quality choices in a duopoly model of vertical differentiation. In a two-stage game model studied here, there are two firms, entrant and incumbent, competing on price with three different quality services. The entrant offers two different quality services, one is superior to the incumbent monopolist’s service quality and the other is inferior one. They face consumers who prefer a higher quality service to a lower one, but differ in how much they are willing to pay for quality. The paper shows that the entrant engages in maximal services differentiation, i.e. selects both the highest and lowest technologically feasible quality services in order not to trigger a low price from the rival, and thus price competition is softened. Moreover, the incumbent tries to set the intermediate quality to the average of the entrant’s two extreme service qualities.