管科系系列讲座第183-184期预告

时间：2017年4月24日（周一）13:30 (183期)

            2017年4月25日（周二）13:30 (184期)

地点：史带楼302

主持人：戴悦教授

主讲嘉宾：Baojun Jiang is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis.

Title：Quality and Pricing Decisions of Experience Goods in Markets with Consumer Information Sharing

Abstract: We provide a dynamic, game-theoretic model to examine a firm’s quality and pricing decisions for a new experience good. Early consumers do not observe product quality prior to purchase but can learn it after purchase and share that product-quality information with later consumers, for example, through online reviews. Both the firm’s quality decision and its cost efficiency are the firm’s private information and not directly observed by the consumer. The early consumers can make a rational inference from the firm’s price about its cost and quality taking into account the firm’s profit incentive from the later informed consumers. We find that in equilibrium a more cost-efficient firm chooses higher quality than does an inefficient firm. One might intuit that a firm will offer higher quality if its high efficiency is known to consumers than if its efficiency is not known, because it will no longer need to convince consumers that it is not the inefficient firm. Our analysis shows that, surprisingly, the opposite may be true—when a firm’s high efficiency is publicly known, the firm may reduce its product quality rather than increase it. Furthermore, consumers’ knowledge about the firm’s cost efficiency can reduce the consumer surplus. We also show that an improvement in the average cost efficiency in the market can lower the consumer surplus.

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Title：Anticipated Regret and Optimal Product-Line Design

Abstract: Consumers are often uncertain about their valuations for product quality when choosing among products of different quality levels in a product line. Consumers will learn their valuations after purchase, and some of them may experience over-purchase or under-purchase regret, depending on whether they have purchased higher or lower quality than the quality that they would have chosen if they had known their true valuations. When consumers anticipate the potential post-purchase regret, their purchase decisions may be affected. Our analysis shows that over-purchase regret lowers the firm’s profit but under-purchase regret can benefit the firm. We show that when the firm optimally designs its product line, the quality difference between its products will be larger (smaller) if anticipated regret increases (reduces) the firm’s profit, and consumers may be better off with anticipated regret than when they are regret-free. We also examine how the firm can improve its profit by alleviating consumer regret through offering free trials or allowing consumers to swap their products on an exchange platform.