关键词: 社群学习, 创新产品, 网络团购, 定价策略

Abstract: The pricing strategy is the key to successfully launching innovative products. Traditional pricing strategies are skimming pricing and penetration pricing. Skimming pricing can gain high profits but keep potential consumers out of market and hinder market development efficiency, while penetration pricing can rapidly capture market share at the expense of profits. With the development of online community, however, a new business model, named group purchase, has been devised and the working mechanism is as follows: Make the group purchase price slightly lower than the evaluation of innovative products by the consumers who are concerned about the new products and willing to pay high price for early adoption in order to activate their perception of consumer surplus (consumer surplus is additional benefit that consumers receive because they are paying less for commodity than what they were willing to pay). Early adopters have to recruit adequate buyers before the deadline if they want the consumer surplus. As a result, they prefer to spread product knowledge and share their experience with potential consumers who have little product information in online community. Through community interaction and learning, potential consumers improve their evaluation of innovations and join the group purchase. In this way, group purchase pricing strategy can not only ensure the ideal profits with relatively high price, but also influence more potential consumers to buy new products due to community learning effect. Compared with traditional skimming pricing and penetration pricing, the group purchase pricing strategy based on online community learning mechanism can achieve an effective balance between the profits rate and the market share under certain conditions. In order to explore these necessary conditions, this paper studies the influencing factors on optimal profits and sales of group purchase pricingstrategy compared with skimming pricing and penetration pricing. The research may contribute to enriching the theory of pricing strategy for innovative products and helping firms achieve an effective balance between the profit rate and the market share for innovative products.
Firstly, online community learning effect influencing individual purchase decision model is established according to online community learning mechanism and Bayesian formula andoptimal profits and sales models of group purchase pricing are constructed. Secondly, based on the above work, the profit comparison model of group purchase pricing vs. skimming pricing and the sales comparison model of group purchase pricing vs. penetration pricing are constructed respectively. Lastly, we conduct simulation experiments on these models by using MATLAB software, and explore the factors that influence group purchase pricing to become dominate strategy.
Firstly, community learning effect is positively correlated with community size, community activity, community identity and community interaction efficiency, and negatively correlated with heterogeneity of community members. Secondly, through simulation experiments, we find that the maximum profits and sales of group purchase pricing for innovative products are positively correlated with community size, community activity, community identity and community interaction efficiency, and negatively correlated with heterogeneity of community members. Lastly, when community size, community activity, community identity and community interaction efficiency are higher than a certain threshold and heterogeneity of community members is below a certain threshold, the group purchase pricing strategy can achieve an effective balance between the profit rate and the market share for innovative products and become the dominant strategy. The research results will help firms employ group purchase pricing strategy to launch innovative products successfully.

Key words: community learning, innovative products, group purchase, pricing strategy