Cooperative Advertising with Bilateral Participation

Abstract

We study cooperative (co-op) advertising strategies in a two-tier distribution channel and extend the popular unilateral participation strategy to bilateral participations. Our research shows that a properly designed bilateral participation has several advantages over unilateral participation. Bilateral participation is capable of coordinating the distribution channel under a very general demand function. In addition, when channel members determine participation parameters endogenously, the bilateral participation improves the channel efficiency and leads to a Pareto improvement over the corresponding unilateral participation. © 2012 Decision Sciences Institute.