管科系系列讲座第175/176期预告

时间：2016年11月22日（周二）/23日（周三）13:30

地点：史带楼501

主持人: 戴悦教授

演讲嘉宾：Baojun Jiang,Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis

Title：Firm Strategies when Facing Consumers with Buying-Local Preferences

Abstract: Business advocacy groups often highlight the benefits of buying from local businesses. This paper studies the implications of consumers’ buying-local preferences on firms’ pricing and quality decisions. We show that consumers’ buying-local preferences tend to increase the local firm’s unit sales and reduce the outside firm’s unit sales, but can lower the profits for both the local firm and the outside firm. Consumers’ buying-local preferences can improve consumer surplus but reduce social welfare, if the local firm’s use of costly public goods induce many consumers to switch to buy from a very cost-efficient outside firm. Our analysis also shows that consumers’ buying-local preferences may lead to higher or lower quality provision by the local firm, depending on the tradeoff between its need for quality differentiation with the outside firm and its relative cost efficiency of producing different quality levels.

Title：Competitive Implications of Consumer Fairness Concerns

Abstract: When consumers perceive that a firm’s price or markup is unfairly high, they become less willing to purchase that firm’s product. Hence, one might intuit that the existence of fair-minded consumers would tend to induce firms to reduce their prices, lowering their profits and increasing the consumers’ surplus. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, our analysis reveals that having a segment of fair-minded consumers in the market has a non-monotonic effect on the firms’ profits. More specifically, if the fraction of consumers having fairness concerns is small, consumers’ fairness concerns can actually alleviate price competition, making firms better off and consumers worse off. Within that range, an increase in the fraction of fair-minded consumers can increase the firms’ profits and reduce the consumers’ surplus. But when the fraction of fair-minded consumers is sufficiently high, firms will compete more aggressively, in which case consumers’ fairness concerns will benefit consumers and reduce the firms’ profits. 

管理科学系

2016-10-17