报告主题：Selling to Time-inconsistent Consumers

报告人：姜力教授

时间：2021年10月21日（周四）下午2:00

地点：旭日楼306教室

主持人：李庆颖

报告简介

Empirical evidence indicates that consumers subjectively weigh the near future more heavily than the further future. When purchasing investment products, they make payments and exert efforts before receiving payoffs. Due to the time difference between incurring cost and receiving payoff, subjective discounting can cause consumers to exhibit time-inconsistent purchase behavior. We investigate the impact of this consumer behavior on the pricing strategies of firms in competitive markets. In a two-period setting, each consumer purchases a product in period one or two, or leaves without purchase. Each firm adopts either dynamic pricing to adjust prices over periods or static pricing to commit to a price. We demonstrate that a firm should adopt a strategy alongside a price trajectory that fits the magnitude of consumers’ time-inconsistency and the quality of its product. Firms have a stronger incentive to adopt dynamic pricing as consumers exhibit stronger time-inconsistency. The skimming policy to decrease prices over time is not necessarily optimal. Static pricing is not always effective in deterring consumers’ purchase postponement but can undermine a firm’s profit. Compared to when both firms engage in dynamic pricing, the firm offering a high-quality product is more likely than its low-quality counterpart to suffer profit loss by unilateral price commitment. As both firms commit to static prices, they are under intense competition and the low-quality firm is more likely to lose profit due to lack of pricing flexibility for differentiated consumer segments.

报告人简介

姜力，香港理工大学工商管理学院教授。姜力教授的研究方向包括：数据驱动运营、信息共享、信用商品市场、行为运营和共享经济平台研究。姜力教授的研究成果发表在Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, and Naval Research Logistic等国际顶级期刊，他同时也是这些期刊的编辑委员会成员。姜力教授2018年被European Association of Operational Research授予杰出学术贡献荣誉，并于2020年入选教育部“长江学者”。