Competition in Marketing: Two Essays on the Impact of Information on Managerial Decisions and on Spatial Product Differentiation

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-action introduces a new concept to the marketing discipline.