Abstract—In modern market, consumer choice behavior attracts attention from researchers and manufacturers for its importance and unpredictability. Many factors influence consumer choice behavior, country of manufacture (COM), price, quality, design, and awareness are the most commonly mentioned in literature. This study aims at investigating the impact of COM effect on consumer choice behavior, and the most important factor in consumers’ mind. Brand choice models are employed to evaluate consumer choice probabilities of seven countries of manufacture. The results show that quality is the most important product attribute, COM, design, price go next, followed by awareness. The choice probabilities are also estimated to show the competitiveness of these COMs in Taiwan market. This may provide manufacturers in these COMs relative information, and help promote their competitiveness.

Index Terms—Brand choice models, country of manufacture.

T. –Y. Wang is with the Tainan University of Technology, Tainan, 71002 Taiwan (e-mail: prisca@seed.net.tw).

Cite: Tien-You Wang , " Evaluating Country-of-Manufacture Effects on Competitiveness," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 1, no. 5, pp. 360-365, 2011.