Multichannel sales strategies are now very popular owing to the prevalence of the Internet, which makes it much easier for manufacturers to engage in direct sales. Because direct channels, including catalogs and the Internet, compete against, substitute for, or complement conventional retail channels, finding the best way to utilize them in conjunction with retail channels continues to be a challenge for many firms. Specifically, multiple channels give rise to channel conflict when the channels compete for almost the same market with substitutable products. To avoid this channel conflict, some manufacturers, such as Daimler, Nikon, and Rubbermaid, have used the Internet as a medium to provide information about their products and/or to point users of the Internet to the nearest retailer carrying the product, but without offering the product for sale directly over the Internet. Dell, which is arguably the most successful Internet marketer in the personal computer market, opened kiosk locations in shopping malls across the US from 2002, and has operated full-scale manufacturer-owned stores since late 2006. However, in 2008, Dell shut down all of its kiosks in the US and instead expanded into retail stores, such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Furthermore, IBM redirects orders taken at ibm.com to its distributors in an attempt to mitigate the conflict, and HP gives their intermediaries a commission fee for orders placed online. In the context of multichannel management, the question of to what degree a manufacturer should set a direct price to coordinate all channels has commanded significant attention from both academic and practical viewpoints. However, marketing research addressing when a manufacturer should determine the direct price is missing from the existing literature, although it is a critical practical issue for manufacturers that adopt a multichannel sales strategy. Given the current status of the literature, this paper investigates the optimal timing of pricing by a manufacturer managing two types of marketing channel, a retail channel and a direct channel, using a dynamic noncooperative game framework. Traditionally, analytical marketing models describing channel conflict between these two channels examine price competition where the retail and direct prices are established simultaneously. In contrast to this conventional approach, our model demonstrates that such a simultaneous price competition never arises if the manufacturer and retailer can choose not only the level of price, but also the timing of pricing. If the manufacturer has sold products wholesale to a retailer presuming that the manufacturer will set the direct price before the retailer prices, the retailer accelerates the timing of retail pricing prior to the direct price setting by the manufacturer. Our findings suggest that the manufacturer should post the direct price before or upon, but not after, selling products wholesale to a retailer. Such upfront posting of the direct price not only constitutes the unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) of the noncooperative game between channel members, but also maximizes profits for the manufacturer. The logic behind this outcome is as follows. If the manufacturer determines the Despite the significant amount of marketing research on multichannel management, an overview of the literature suggests that research incorporating the choice of optimal pricing timing into channel operation issues is completely lacking, despite the fact that the timing for posting the direct price is a crucial problem for manufacturers. That is, the existing marketing literature treats the order of moves of channel members as exogenously given, which is rather surprising because each member is expected to maximize its own profits in the context of a standard price-setting game. From a multichannel management perspective, this paper addresses the issue of the endogenous order of moves by adopting the established observable delay game framework (e.g., Hamilton and Slutsky 1990). Therefore, it is worth noting that the present paper is the first to introduce the idea of endogenous choice of decision timing in the field of marketing research. Our findings imply that the addition of a direct channel and the posting of a direct price after the sale of a substantial number of products through a traditional retail channel—a common multichannel strategy in practice—is inferior from the viewpoint of overall profit maximization. If a manufacturer employs such a strategy, it fails to coordinate the marketing channels and to maximize the channel profits. Indeed, as noted at the beginning of this section, many dominant manufacturers in various industries have withdrawn their direct channels. Our model effectively explains such real cases, providing useful managerial insights for business practitioners.

• Kenji Matsui(Kobe University)