【正文】 短學(xué)期課程報(bào)告 外 文 翻 譯 題 目 價(jià)格戰(zhàn)的研究綜述 學(xué) 院 商學(xué)院 專 業(yè) 市場(chǎng)營(yíng)銷 班 級(jí) 學(xué) 號(hào) 學(xué)生姓名 指導(dǎo)教師 審核意見(jiàn)： 指導(dǎo)教師（簽名） 年 月 日 一、外文原文 （一）標(biāo)題： How to Fight a Price War 原文： In the battle to capture the customer, panies use a wide range of tactics to ward off petitors. Increasingly, price is the weapon of choice – and frequently the skirmishing degenerates into a price war. Creating low price appeal is often the goal, but the result of one retaliatory price slashing after another is often a precipitous decline in industry profits. Look at the airline price wars of 1992. When American Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and other . carriers went toetotoe in matching and exceeding one another’s reduced fares, the result was record volumes of air traveland record losses. Some estimates suggest that the overall losses suffered by the industry that year exceed the bined profits for the entire industry from its inception. Price wars can create economically devastating and psychologically debilitating situations that take an extraordinary toll on an individual, a pany, and industry profitability. No matter who wins, the batants all seem to end up worse off than before they joined the battle. And yet, price wars are being increasingly mon and unmonly fierce. Consider the following two examples: ? In July 1999, Sprint announced a nighttime longdistance rate of 5 cents per minute. In August 1999, MCI matched Sprint’s offpeak rate. Later that month, AT amp。 T acknowledged that revenue from its consumer longdistance business was falling, and the pany cut its longdistance rates to 7 cents per minute all day, everyday, for a monthly fee of $ . AT amp。 T’s stock dropped % the day of the announcement. MCI’s stock price dropped %。 Sprint’s fell %. ? ETrade and other electronic brokers are changing the petitive terrain of financial services with their extraordinarily lowpriced brokerage services. The prevailing price for discount trades has fallen from $30 to $ 15 to $ 8 in the past few years. There is a little doubt, in the first example, that the major players in the longdistance phone business are in a price war. Price reductions persecond billing, and free calls are the principal weapons the players bring to the petitive arena. There is little talk from any of the carriers about service, quality, brand equity, and other nonprice factors that might add value to a product or service. Virtually every petitive move is based on price, and every countermeasure is a retaliatory price cut. Price wars are being more mon because managers tend to view a price change as an easy, quick, and reversible action In the second example, the petitive situation is subtly different – and yet still very much a price war. ETrade’s success demonstrates how the emergence of the Inter has fundamentally changed the cost of doing business. Consequently, even businesses such as Charles Schwab, which used to pete primarily on lowprice appeal, are chanting a ―quality‖ mantra. Meanwhile, Merrill Lynch and American Express have recognized that the emergence of the Inter will affect pricing and are changing their price structures to include free online trades for highend customers. These panies appear to be engaged in more focused pricing battles, unlike the ―globalized‖ price war in the longdistance phone market. Most managers will be involved in a price war at some point in their careers. Every price cut is potentially the first salvo, and some discounts routinely lead to retaliatory price cuts that then escalate into a fullblown price war. That’s why it’s a good idea to consider other options before starting a price war or responding to an aggressive price move with a retaliatory one. Often, panies can avoid a debilitating price war altogether by using a set of alternative tactics. Our goal is to describe an arsenal of weapons other than price cuts that managers who are engaged in or contemplating a price war may also want to consider. Take Inventory Generally, price wars start because somebody somewhere thinks prices in a certain market are too high. Or someone is willing to buy market share at the expense of current margins. Price wars are being more mon because managers tend to view a price change as an easy, quick, and reversible action. When business do not trust or know one another very well, the pricing battles can escalate very quickly. And whether they play out in the physical or the virtual world, price wars have a similar set of antecedents. By understanding their causes and characteristics, managers can make sensible decisions about when and how to fight a price war, when to flee oneand even when to start one. The first step, then, is diagnosis. Consider a small modities supplier that suddenly found that its largest petitor had slashed prices to a level well below the small pany’s costs. One option the smaller pany considered was to lower its price in a titfortat move. But that price would have been below the supplier’s marginal cost。 it would have suffered debilitating losses. Fortunately, a few phone calls revealed that its adversary was attempting to drive the supplier out of the local market by underpricing its products locally but maintaining high prices elsewhere. The supplier correctly diagnosed the pricing move as predatory and elected to do two things. First, the manager called customers in the petitor’s home market to let them know that the pricecutter was offering special deals in another