Facilitating Fit Revelation in the Competitive Market

This study examines firms' strategic decisions in the competitive market regarding whether to engage in marketing activities to assist consumers in finding the fit between their personal tastes and products' horizontal attributes. We find that competitive firms' strategies to facilitate fit revelation critically depend on the product qualities they offer. In particular, a firm offering a high-quality product is more likely to facilitate fit revelation in the competitive market than it would as a market monopolist, whereas a firm offering a low-quality product is less likely to do so. In addition, the firm offering the high-quality product implements fit-revealing activities in a greater intensity than its rival that offers the low-quality product, if the quality difference between the two products is small and both products' qualities are sufficiently high.

This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.