Asymmetric competition refers to forms of
business
Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for pr ...
competition where firms are considered competitors in some markets or contexts but not in others. In such cases a firm may choose to allocate competitive resources and marketing actions among its competitors out of proportion to their
market share
Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those units would have a ...
.
Asymmetric competition can be visualized using techniques such as
multidimensional scaling
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a means of visualizing the level of similarity of individual cases of a dataset. MDS is used to translate "information about the pairwise 'distances' among a set of n objects or individuals" into a configurati ...
and
perceptual mapping.
Forms of asymmetric competition
*Firm A may compete with B in some markets but not others.
*Firm A competes with B over certain attributes (such as
reliability
Reliability, reliable, or unreliable may refer to:
Science, technology, and mathematics Computing
* Data reliability (disambiguation), a property of some disk arrays in computer storage
* High availability
* Reliability (computer networking), a ...
and
design
A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design'' ...
) but not over others (price).
*Firm A considers B as a competitor but B does not consider A to be a competitor.
*Firm A does not consider B to be a competitor, however,
consumers
A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. T ...
see A's products as competing with B's products.
See also
*
Competition
Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero-sum game). Competition can arise between entities such as organisms, indivi ...
*
Coopetition
Coopetition or co-opetition (sometimes spelled "coopertition" or "co-opertition") is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition. Basic principles of co-opetitive structures ...
*
Product differentiation
In economics and marketing, product differentiation (or simply differentiation) is the process of distinguishing a product or service from others to make it more attractive to a particular target market. This involves differentiating it from com ...
*
Non-price competition
Non-price competition is a marketing strategy "in which one firm tries to distinguish its product or service from competing products on the basis of attributes like design and workmanship". It often occurs in imperfectly competitive markets becau ...
*
Information asymmetry
In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other.
Information asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which ca ...
*
Multimarket contact Multimarket contact occurs when firms compete with the same rivals in multiple markets. When firms compete with each other in more than one market, their competitive behavior may differ from that of single-market rivals. Multimarket contact gives ...
*
Size-asymmetric competition Size-asymmetric competition refers to situations in which larger individuals exploit disproportionately greater amounts of resources when competition (biology), competing with smaller individuals.Schwinning, S. & Weiner, J. Mechanisms determining th ...
References
Bibliography
*Carpenter, Gregory S., Lee G. Cooper, Dominique M. Hanssens, and David F. Midgley. "Modeling asymmetric competition." Marketing Science 7, no. 4 (1988): 393-412.
*
Scitovsky, Tibor. "The benefits of asymmetric markets." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 4, no. 1 (1990): 135-148.
*
DeSarbo, Wayne S.,
Rajdeep Grewal
Rajdeep 'Raj' Grewal is the Townsend Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Marketing Research. He is known for his work ...
, and
Jerry Wind
Jerry (Yoram) Wind is The Lauder Professor and Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and is the founding director of the Wharton "think tank,” The SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management. He is i ...
. "Who competes with whom? A demand‐based perspective for identifying and representing asymmetric competition." Strategic Management Journal 27, no. 2 (2006): 101-129.
*Etzion, Hila, and Edieal J. Pinker. "Asymmetric competition in B2B spot markets." Production and Operations Management 17, no. 2 (2008): 150-161.
*Ringel, Daniel M., and Bernd Skiera. "Visualizing asymmetric competition among more than 1,000 products using big search data." Marketing Science 35, no. 3 (2016): 511-534.
Marketing research
Marketing strategy
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