Counterfeit Competition With Strategic Consumers
研究品牌商与仿冒品在耐用商品市场上的两期竞争，发现当质量差距足够大时，品牌商可通过提高第二期价格来传递正品信号，从而增加首期销量和利润，缓解时间不一致问题。
This article investigates competition between a branded firm selling a durable good over two periods and a deceptive counterfeiter entering the market in the second period. The two firms engage in a price signaling game in which the branded firm designs its price strategy over two periods, and strategic consumers decide whether to buy the authentic product upfront or wait until the second period. We find that the branded firm may benefit from the counterfeit competition if the quality gap between the two products is sufficiently large. The intuition is that the branded firm would charge a high second-period price to signal its authenticity, inducing more consumers to buy the genuine product upfront. This strategy allows the branded firm to increase its first-period price and demand simultaneously, thus effectively mitigating the time-inconsistency problem. Otherwise, when the quality gap is small, counterfeit competition leads to reduced profits for the authentic product. These results remain robust throughout several extensions of the base model, including partially informed or naive consumers, asymmetric retail channels, post-purchase regret, and endogenized counterfeit.