This paper investigates the impact of decision timing for pricing and marketing efforts in a supply chain led
by competing manufacturers.We develop and solve six games to consider the scenarios (games) where prices
and marketing efforts (ME) are decided simultaneously, and when they are not (i.e., ME is set either before or
after prices). We examine these three scenarios for the benchmark case of a bilateral monopolistic channel,
then extend the analysis to a supply chain with competing manufacturers. We identify the optimal decision
timing by comparing equilibrium profits and strategies across games in each supply chain setup. We find
that a monopolistic manufacturer always prefers that prices and ME be decided simultaneously. However,
this result does not hold when product competition is taken into account. The optimal decision timing for
competing manufacturers depends on the retailer’s and manufacturers’ ME effectiveness levels as well as
on competition intensity. Specifically, when ME are not very effective, a simultaneous decision scenario is
preferred because it provides the advantage of higher profit margins or sales. However, for highly effective
ME, manufacturers prefer to decouple ME and pricing decisions. The retailer’s optimal scenario is either to
make all decisions simultaneously or to choose prices prior to ME. This means that supply chain firms can
face conflict due to the decision timing for prices and ME.
