Market Structure Analysis of Automobile Market in U.S.A

미국자동차시장의 구조분석

Market structure analysis is a very useful tool to analyze the competition boundary of the brand or the company. But most of the studies in market structure analysis, the concern lies in nondurable goods such as candies, soft drink and etc. because of the their availability of the data. In the field of durable goods, the limitation of the data availability and the repurchase time period constrain the study. In the analysis of the automobile market, those of views might be more persuasive. The purpose of this study is to analyze the structure of automobile market based on some idea suggested by prior studies. Usually the buyers of the automobile tend to buy upper tier when they buy in the next time. That kind of behavior make it impossible to analyze the structure of automobile market under the level of automobile model. For that reason I tried to analyze the market structure in the brand or company level. In this study, consideration data was used for market structure analysis. The reasons why we used the consideration data are summarized as following. Firstly, as the repurchase time cycle is too long, brand switching data which is used for the market analysis of nondurable good is not avaliable. Secondly, as we mentioned, the buyers of the automobile tend to buy upper tier when they buy in the next time. We used survey data collected in the U.S.A. market in the year of 2005 through questionaire. The sample size was 8,291. The number of brand analyzed in this study was 9 among 37 which was being sold in U.S.A. market. Their market share was around 50%. The brands considered were BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, Honda, Mercedes, and Toyota. �� ratio was derived from frequency of the consideration set. Actually the frequency is different from the brand switch concept. In this study to compute the �� ratio, the frequency of the consideration set was used like a frequency of brand switch for convenience. The study can be divided into 2 steps. The first step is to build hypothetical market structures. The second step is to choose the best structure based on the hypothetical market structures, Usually logit analysis is used for the choice best structure. In this study we built 3 hypothetical market structure. They are type-cost, cost-type, and unstructured. We classified the automobile into 5 types, sedan, SUV(Sport Utility Vehicle), Pickup, Mini Van, and Full-size Van. As for purchasing cost, we classified it 2 groups based on the median value. The median value was $28,800. To decide best structure among them, maximum likelihood test was used. Resulting from market structure analysis, we find that the automobile market of USA is hierarchically structured in the form of 'automobile type - purchasing cost'. That is, result showed that automobile buyers considered function or usage first and purchasing cost next. This study has some limitations in the analysis level and variable selection. First, in this study only type of the automobile and purchasing cost were as attributes considered for purchase. Considering other attributes is very needful. Because of the attributes considered, only 3 hypothetical structure could be analyzed. Second, due to the data, brand level analysis was tried. But model level analysis would be better because automobile buyers consider model not brand. To conduct model level study more cases should be obtained. That is for acquiring the better practical meaning, brand level analysis should be conducted when we consider the actual competition which occurred in the real market. Third, the variable selection for building nested logit model was very limited to some avaliable data. In spite of those limitations, the importance of this study lies in the trial of market structure analysis of durable good.

본 연구는 미국의 자동시장의 시장구조를 분석한 것이다. 자동차 시장의 구조분석는 제품의 특성이 냐내구재라는 점에서 의의가 있다. 그 동안 시장구조분석은 일반포장소비재를 중심으로 분석되어 왔으나 자동차의 시장구조분석는 자동차의 구매주기가 장기간이며, 다음 구매는 많은 소비자가 상위차급으로 이동한다는 점에서 기존의 분석에 사용되었던 상표전환자료를 사용하는데 한계가 있다. 이 때문에 본 연구에서는 구매고려상표군을 중심으로 우사성지수로 사용하여 시장구조분석을 하였다. 자료는 미국의 자동차구매에 관한 이차자료를 활용하였으며, 자료의 특성상 일부차종에 한정하여 사용하였다. 크게 세가지 형태-비용, 비용-형태, 비구조화의 가설적 시장을 비교분석하였으며, 결과적으로 형태-비용 구조가 가장 우수한 것으로 판단되었다.