Rick Blaine wrote:

> And the collolary to that absolutely true statement is that there is no reason
> to price lower unless you want to trade margin for share, which Wall Street is
> very unlikely to approve of.

Yet the Japanese car companies do exactly that.

The problem with trading margin for share is that all the company's
existing customers that are perfectly happy to pay higher prices, are
also beneficiaries of lower prices, not just new customers that they
might snag. And of course they don't want to create a price war that
ends up benefiting no-one.

I.e., I would gladly have paid $20,000 for our Toyota Camry LE, rather
than the $17,000 we paid. The fact that Toyota was trying to buy market
share, and keep their factories at full capacity, benefited me greatly.
Even if GM or Ford had dropped the price of whatever competing vehicle
they were offering to $13,000, it would not have caused me to buy their
product.