管科系系列讲座第167/168期预告

时间：2016年7月4日（周一）13:30

地点：史带楼303

主持人: 冯天俊副教授

演讲嘉宾：Tingliang Huang, Assistant Professor, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

Title：Dynamic Management of Probabilistic Selling with Customer Bounded Rationality

Abstract：Probabilistic or opaque selling, whereby the seller hides the exact identity of the product until after the buyer makes the payment, has been used in practice. The existing literature has largely focused on understanding why opaque selling selling is attractive to firms. A variety of explanations (e.g., to price discriminate consumers, to reduce supply-demand mismatches, to soften price competition, and to exploit customer bounded rationality) have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we intend to answer a practically important “follow-up" question: How should opaque selling be managed in a firm's daily operations in practice? Answering this question is complex, since (i) the profitability of opaque selling depends on how customers respond to the firm's product offering strategies and (ii) the firm's strategies have to be responsive to customers' purchasing decisions to maximize its long-term profit. We develop a dynamic programming framework to capture the dynamic nature of the problem in multiple periods when customers boundedly rationally expect the firm's product-offering strategies through anecdotal reasoning. The state of the dynamic programming model is multi-dimensional. We characterize the firm's optimal product offering policy depending on the market environment. We show that the optimal policy involves selling the opaque product by cyclically oscillating between two product-offering probabilities under certain conditions. We then develop some intuitive and easy-to-implement heuristics for solving the general problem.

时间：2016年7月4日（周一）14:30

地点：史带楼303

主持人: 冯天俊副教授

演讲嘉宾：Yinghao Zhang, Assistant Professor, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati

Title：Cognitive Hierarchy in Capacity Allocation Games

Abstract：We examine a supply chain with a single supplier and multiple retailers to predict retailers’ actual ordering behaviors. If retailer orders exceed supplier capacity, a proportional rationing rule applies to capacity allocation among retailers. We propose a behavior model based on cognitive hierarchy theory, in which retailers with different levels of strategic-reasoning capabilities form heterogeneous beliefs about other players’ capabilities when choosing their orders. This behavioral model yields three interesting predictions. First, retailers’ orders increase as the number of retailers decreases or the supplier’s production capacity shrinks. Second, the orders tend to increase as the retailer population becomes more “sophisticated”. Third, retailers’ profits first increase in relation to their strategic-reasoning capabilities and then decrease, indicating an inverted U-shaped relationship between profits and strategic-reasoning capabilities. We experimentally examine the capacity allocation game with participants motivated by financial incentives. The experimental results and structural model estimation confirm the predictions of the behavioral model.

管理科学系

2016-6-29