考虑参照依赖与产品展示的体验式商品定价与订购策略

Pricing and Ordering Decisions for Experience Goods with Reference Dependence and Product Demonstrations

消费者在购买体验式商品时面临着产品价值的不确定性,因而会产生参照依赖行为。本文研究了考虑消费者参照依赖行为的定价与订购问题,并分析了产品展示策略的影响。研究发现,给定产品满足率时,只有当消费者获得高价值的概率大于某个临界值时,参照依赖下的最优价格才会高于没有参照依赖下的最优价格,并且产品价值维度与产品价格维度的参照依赖对最优价格起着相反的作用。进一步给出了最优订购量满足的条件,并发现在一定条件下最优价格随着订购量的增大而增大。当企业采取产品展示策略之后,会产生两方面的效应,一是消费者数量减少,二是剩余消费者的保留价格增大,此时最优价格随着展示系数的增大而增大。最后,通过数值分析得到了更多的管理启示。

An experience good(e.g.,phone and fashion)is a product that a consumer can not readily determine the value of the product until he uses it after purchase.When consumers purchase experience goods,they will be reference-dependent due to the uncertainty of the product value.The consumer feels psychological gain when the actual outcome is better than the expectation,and feels psychological loss otherwise.In reality,a lot of firms adopt product demonstrations to help consumers reduce the valuation uncertainty.Hence,it is necessary to study the impact of reference effect and product demonstrations on the firm’s pricing and ordering decisions.In this paper,the consumer’s utility includes two components,i.e.,economic utility and referencedependent utility.Consumers are homogeneous in the uncertainty of the product value before purchase,but have their own valuations of the product after purchase.Based on the framework of newsvendor model,ajoint pricing and ordering problem with the consideration of reference dependent effect is addressed,and the necessary conditions of the optimal solutions are obtained by the optimization method.Then,the impact of the product demonstration policy on the firm’s decisions is explored.Demonstrations help consumers learn about the product value and arise two effects:the number of total consumers decreases and the consumer’s reservation price increases.The necessary conditions of the optimal solutions under demonstrationsare obtained as well.The main results are summarized as follows.First of all,for any given fill rate,the price with the reference dependence is higher than that without the reference dependence only when the probability that a consumer obtains a high value is greater than a threshold.Secondly,the reference dependence of the product value and the reference dependence of the price have the opposite effect on the optimal price.Thirdly,the optimal price is increasing in the given initial order quantity when consumers are loss aversion.Furthermore,the optimal price is increasing in the demonstration degree when the seller adopts a demonstration policy.Finally,more managerial insights are obtained by numerical studies.Particularly,the reference dependence and loss aversion in the price(product value)dimension have negative(positive)effect on the firm.