消费者选择行为下的电商战略性缺货问题研究

Online retailers’ strategic rationing based on consumer choice behavior

随着互联网经济的日益普及,国内电商企业开展“双十一”等大型促销活动十分活跃,与此同时,促销期产品缺货、电商企业临时取消订单等问题也日益引起了关注.由于产品可得性会和价格共同影响消费者的购买选择,因而如何科学理性地管理缺货问题,成为值得深入研究的话题.从消费者选择理论出发,研究了中国电商企业的折扣定价与市场需求转移机制,并在考虑运营能力的现实约束前提下深入分析了中国电商企业战略性缺货策略的形成机理与演化路径.研究结果表明,当产品的单位运营成本增加幅度超过某一阈值点时,企业就有可能不再满足所有顾客的订货需求;并且较之事后调整型的订单取消与临时缺货,事先有考虑的战略性缺货策略会更加有利于电商企业.在网络购物越来越普及的今天,研究结果对正确理解互联网企业的运营机制,推进我国电商行业的良性发展具有重要的启示.

With the development of e-commerce,online retailers’ Double-Eleven Day and other large-scale promotional activities are very popular in recent years. The complaints of out of stock of products and cancelled orders that follow have also attracted increasing attention in recent days. Since price and product availability affect a consumer’s purchase choice jointly,how to manage online retailer’s stock-out level rationally has become a hot topic deserving to be further investigated. This paper firstly studies the online retailers’ discount pricing and the shift of market demand during promotions based on consumer choice theory. Then the rationale and evolution path of online retailers’ strategic rationing decision are analyzed with consideration of capacity constraint. This paper shows that the ex post strategic rationing outperforms the fully fulfilled strategy when the unit operating cost increases and exceeds a certain threshold point. The ex ante strategic rationing is more profitable than the ex post strategic rationing. With more and more popularity of online purchasing,our study facilitates the understanding of the operations management of internet business and also helps to achieve the healthy development of e-commerce in China