基于策略型消费者的预售退货策略研究

Research on the advance selling and return policy based on strategic consumer

卖方的频繁降价促销和退货策略使得消费者行为越来越复杂,导致消费者表现出策略型等待购买和退货行为。卖方预售时采用退货策略虽然可提高消费者的产品估值,但同时也面临大量退货风险,尤其是面对越来越复杂的策略型消费者,如何处理这些退货就成为卖方必须解决的核心问题。本文运用理性预期均衡理论,构建了三种产能约束下的预售退货模型,研究了存在策略型消费者时,单一预售策略、预售退货不再销售和预售退货可再正常销售策略,如何影响卖方的预售退货策略设计。研究发现:当卖方产能有限,且退货再处理成本足够低时,(1)当预订需求较小且低于卖方一半产能时,预售与退货可再正常销售的退货保证机制相结合,能够使卖方获得最优期望利润;(2)当预订需求较高且超过卖方一半产能时,卖方适合采用单一预售策略,不需要提供任何退货保证。

With the rapid development of the global markets,information technology and“Internet+”industry,human beings economic life entered the digital and network age.Sellers are facing challenges from global markets and competitors.Those challenges include product updates faster,product value changes over time,and consumer’s demand becomes more and more personalized,diversified,and predicted difficulty.The seller frequently made use of price promotions and return policies to induce more consumers to buy.These policies have trained consumers to become more and more sophisticated.As such,consumers always strategically choose the chance to buy products at lower prices.In other word,consumers often delay to purchase strategically and even apply the seller to return the full or partial refund for them,which damages the benefit of the seller.While advance selling can improve the accuracy of demand forecasts,increase the seller’s profit,and make consumers avoid the risk of stockout in the sale season by preordering or buying in advance.Therefore,different economic entities have adopted the Web platform to provide advance selling with the return policy of tangible products or intangible services for the consumer,which can enhance the consumer product value but encounter the risk of higher returned amounts.So,how to deal with the returned product has become a core problem that the seller must solve,especially facing more and more complicated strategic consumer.First of all,in the model setting,this paper divides the consumers into high-type consumers and low-type consumers according to the consumer's product value.All the high-type consumers are strategic.All the low-type consumers arrive in the second period.The demand for both types of consumers is relevant.To attract consumers to purchase in advance,the seller will provide return policy.In the case of not affecting the secondary sales of returned products,the preorder customers will choose to return the preordered product after receiving the product in the regular selling period if they find that the actual product value is less than the refund provided by the seller.Buyers will choose to retain the product if the actual product value is higher than the refund.The seller deals with the return in two ways.One is that the returned product is no longer sold,the other is that the returned product is sold at the same price of the new product in the regular selling period.This is no fault return since the returned product has no quality problem.This paper assumes that the remaining consumers will have the same maximum willingness to pay for the returned product and the new product.Secondly,based on the consumer behavior theory,rational expectation equilibrium theory,and newsvendor model,this paper analyzes the influence of several different return guarantee mechanisms of advance selling with limited manufacture capacity.The total market demand(normalizing the total market size as 1)on the seller's profit is determined at the same time of taking into account the strategic behavior and return behavior.This paper establishes three advance selling and return models with the capacity constraints,and studies how the design of the seller’s advance selling and return policies are affected by three different strategies:single advance selling strategy,advance selling strategy with return product no resold and return product regularly resold strategy in the presence of strategic consumer.The research discovers when the seller capacity is limited,and the disposal cost of the returned product is low enough,the seller gains the optimal expected profit by combining advance selling with the return policy of the returned product resold regularly as the preorder demand is less than half of the seller capacity.Conversely,the seller is adapted to use a single advance selling strategy without offering any return guarantee when the preorder demand is more than half of the seller capacity.Finally,this paper verifies the validity of conclusions by adopting the numerical simulation analysis and suggests that the seller is more beneficial from the return guarantee mechanisms of the advance selling.It is necessary for the seller to improve the processing level of the returned product as much as possible to reduce the reprocessing cost.Also,this paper proposes several future research topics by combining the more complicated reality situation and according to the theory and numerical analysis.