Implications for firms with limited information to take advantage of reference price effect in competitive settings

Abstract

This paper studies internal reference price effects when competitive firms face reference price effects and make decisions based on partial information, where their decision-making mechanism is modeled by a dynamic adjustment process. It is shown that the evolution of this dynamic adjustment goes to stabilization if both adjustment speeds are small and the complexity of this evolution increases in adjustment speeds. It is proved that the necessary condition for flip bifurcation or Neimark-Sacker bifurcation will occur with the increase of adjustment speed in two special cases. What is more, numerical simulations show that these bifurcations do occur. Then, the impacts of parameters on stability and profits are investigated and some management insights for firms with limited information to take advantage of reference price effects are provided.