管科系系列讲座第164期预告

时间：2016年6月14日（周二）13:30

地点：史带楼304

主持人: 吴肖乐副教授

演讲嘉宾：Baojun Jiang, Olin Business School, Washington University

Title：Consumer Search on Online Retail Platform

Abstract：On an online retail platform such as Amazon.com, many independent sellers sell differentiated products and pay the platform a referral or commission fee that is a percentage of the sales revenue. Consumers can search on the platform to learn the sellers’ prices as well as how well the products fit their needs. With advances in mobile technology and improvements in customer experience on these platforms, consumer search cost has significantly decreased. This paper develops an analytical framework to study how a lower search cost affects a platform’s and the sellers’ optimal pricing decisions and profits. Ex ante, consumers do not know the product prices, nor how well the products match their preferences. They can sequentially search to learn each product’s price and match level. One might intuit that a lower search cost on the platform will lead to more intense competition, making the sellers worse off. Our analysis reveals that, interestingly, a lower search cost can actually increase the sellers’ expected profits, because it can increase the market demand—more consumers will search and buy on the platform and they are more likely to find a better matched product for which they are willing to pay more. We show that the retail platform can always benefit from a lower search cost if it optimally adjusts its referral fee. Interestingly, it can be optimal for the platform to lower its fee if the lowered search cost significantly increases the demand elasticity, in which case the double-marginalization problem in the channel is alleviated, leading to a win-win-win for the platform, the sellers and the consumers. By contrast, if the lowered search cost increases the demand elasticity only slightly or reduces it, the platform’s optimal referral fee will be higher, which will exacerbate the double-marginalization problem, thereby leading to higher retail prices in equilibrium but making both consumers and the sellers worse off.

管理科学系

2016-6-7