视听｜为什么竞争者都把店开在一起？

听说每一家肯德基旁边必然有一家麦当劳，你注意到这种现象了吗？人们总能看到售卖相同或类似商品的店铺集中在一起，有时甚至占据了一整条街，比如家具城、电脑城、购物街、美食街等，这些竞争者为什么这么喜欢“扎堆儿”？我们听听学者 Jac de Haan 怎么说。

——

Why Do Competitors Open Their Stores Next to One Another?

里面一

Why are gas stations always built right next to other gas stations? Why can I drive for a mile without finding a coffee shop and then stumble① across three on the same corner? Why do grocery stores, auto repair shops and restaurants always seem to exist in groups instead of being spread evenly throughout a community? 

① stumble: [ˈstʌmbl] v. to walk in an unsteady way and often almost fall. 跌跌撞撞地走

While there are several factors that might go into deciding where to place your business, clusters of similar companies can be explained by a very simple story called Hotelling’s Model of Spatial Competition②. 

② Hotelling’s Model of Spatial Competition: Hotelling’s 1929 paper on the stability of competition introduced the notion of spatial competition in a duopoly situation. He used the analogy of two stores locating on Main Street to analyze the phenomenon of strategic product differentiation. 霍特林空间竞争模型: 消费者在地理或产品特征空间中与卖方越远，则其购买的成本就越高，厂商或产品只与邻近他们的厂商或产品展开直接竞争。

Imagine that you sell ice cream at the beach. Your beach is one mile long and you have no competition. Where would you place your cart③ in order to sell the most product? In the middle. The one-half-mile walk may be too far for some people at each end of the beach, but your cart serves as many people as possible. 

③ cart: [kɑːrt] n. a small table with wheels, used for moving and serving food and drinks. 手推车

One day you show up at work just as your cousin Teddy is arriving at the beach with his own ice cream cart. In fact, he’s selling exactly the same type of ice cream as you are. You agree that you will split the beach in half. 

In order to ensure that customers don’t have to walk too far you set up your cart a quarter mile south of the beach center, right in the middle of your territory. Teddy sets up a quarter mile north of the center, in the middle of Teddy territory. With this agreement, everyone south of you buys ice cream from you. 

Everyone north of Teddy buys from him, and the 50% of beachgoers in between walk to the closest cart. No one walks more than a quarter of a mile, and both vendors sell to half of the beachgoers. Game theorists④ consider this a socially optimal⑤ solution. It minimizes the maximum number of steps any visitor must take in order to reach an ice cream cart. 

④ Game theorists: [ɡeɪmˈθiərəst] n. theorists in the parts of mathematics that deals with situations in which people compete with each other, for example war or business. 博弈理论家

⑤ optimal: [ˈɑːptɪməl] adj. the best or most suitable. 最佳的

The next day, when you arrive at work, Teddy has set up his cart in the middle of the beach. You return to your location a quarter mile south of center and get the 25% of customers to the south of you. Teddy still gets all of the customers north in Teddy territory, but now you split the 25% of people in between the two carts. 

Day three of the ice cream wars, you get to the beach early, and set up right in the center of Teddy territory, assuming you’ll serve the 75% of beachgoers to your south, leaving your cousin to sell to the 25% of customers to the north. When Teddy arrives, he sets up just south of you stealing all of the southerly⑥ customers, and leaving you with a small group of people to the north.

⑥ southerly: [ˈsəðərli] adj. towards or in the south. 从南面来的

Not to be outdone⑦, you move 10 paces south of Teddy to regain your customers. When you take a mid-day break, Teddy shuffles 10 paces south of you, and again, steals back all the customers to the far end of the beach. 

⑦ outdone：[ˌaʊt'dʌn] adj. in order not to let someone else do better or seem better than you. 不被超过

Throughout the course of the day, both of you continue to periodically⑧ move south towards the bulk of the ice cream buyers, until both of you eventually end up at the center of the beach, back to back, each serving 50% of the ice-cream-hungry beachgoers. 

⑧ periodically: [ˌpiriˈɑːdɪkəli] adv. happening a number of times. 循环往复地

At this point, you and your competitive cousin have reached what game theorists call a Nash Equilibrium–the point where neither of you can improve your position by deviating from your current strategy. 

Your original strategy, where you were each a quarter mile from the middle of the beach, didn’t last, because it wasn’t a Nash Equilibrium⑨. Either of you could move your cart towards the other to sell more ice cream. With both of you now in the center of the beach, you can’t reposition your cart closer to your furthest customers without making your current customers worse off. 

⑨ Nash Equilibrium: In game theory, Nash equilibrium is to point to in the noncooperative games contain two or more participants (Non-cooperative Game), assuming that each of the participants know that other players’ equilibrium strategies of case, none of the participants can change its own strategic benefit itself through a concept. 纳什均衡：博弈学术语，指博弈中这样的局面，对于每个参与者来说，只要其他人不改变策略，他就无法改善自己的状况，因此他们可以改变原先的利益格局，通过谈判寻求新的利益评估分摊方案。

However, you no longer have a socially optimal solution, since customers at either end of the beach have to walk further than necessary to get a sweet treat. Think about all the fast food chains, clothing boutiques, or mobile phone kiosks ⑩ at the mall. Customers may be better served by distributing services throughout a community, but this leaves businesses vulnerable to aggressive competition. 

⑩ kiosks: [ˈki:ˌɔsks] n. a small building in the street, where newspapers, sweets etc are sold. 移动电话亭

In the real world, customers come from more than one direction, and businesses are free to compete with marketing strategies, by differentiating their product line, and with price cuts, but at the heart of their strategy, companies like to keep their competition as close as possible.

文章来源：TED官网

大连外国语大学高级翻译学院实习生

穆楠 整理

（视频截图）

【往期回顾】

「点击封面购买杂志」

▼