Defending Mail Markets against New Entrants: An Application of the Defender Model

In this paper we analyzed the strategic competition between incumbent postal operators and market entrants in liberalized letter markets based on the “defender consumer model” pioneered by Hauser and Shugan (1983) and derived qualitative normative implications on how an established firm should defend its profits when facing an attack by a new competitive product. Our results extend the literature on competition in liberalized mail markets by combining pricing and positioning strategies from a marketing perspective. Our analysis highlights that incumbent postal operators can defend their market shares by differentiating their services along one or more quality dimensions. Postal services are not necessarily homogenous. If postal operators focus solely on pricing strategies they will run into the more serious problems than if they compete on quality too.