关键词: 顾客评论, 制造商竞争, Stackelberg博弈

Abstract: The development of the Internet has spawned a huge amount of online shopping. However, in online sales, customers can not actually perceive the products they want to buy, which leads to the fact that consumers are usually highly uncertain about the product quality. To resolve this uncertainty, many online retail platforms, such as Taobao.com and JD.com, have launched their own review systems to encourage customers to leave their own reviews. As an important carrier of product information dissemination, customer reviews are paid more and more attention to by consumers, and play an important role in customer purchasing behavior. At the same time, manufacturer competition has always been a concern of enterprise managers and scholars. For example, large retail enterprises such as Amazon, JD self-operated store and Suning have strong bargaining power in the face of upstream manufacturers and are often in the position to select rather than to be selected in actual procurement.
Therefore, these retail enterprises usually sell the same kind of products from different manufacturers at the same time, such that supermarkets will simultaneously sell similar daily chemicals and snacks of different brands. In this light, how upstream manufacturers stand out in the fierce competition for homogeneous products becomes extremely critical. Customer reviews are an important factor, and there is an important tradeoff behind this: on the one hand, when there are no customer reviews, consumers only rely on their own evaluation of product quality to make purchasing strategies, and manufacturers selling homogeneous products are in a state of perfect competition; on the other hand, when there are customer reviews, the quality information consumers get from customer reviews will have an upward or downward revised effect on consumers' perceived quality. At the same time, customer reviews will make the products that are completely replaced in the eyes of consumers appear different, thereby affecting the degree of competition between competing manufacturers.
We consider a supply chain composed of two manufacturers and a common online retailer and study the effects of customer reviews and manufacturer competition on supply chain decisions and profits. In the monopoly manufacturer market, introducing customer reviews will modify the perceived quality of consumers. In the duopoly manufacturer market, it will further mitigate manufacturer competition. These results indicate that in the duopoly manufacturer market, when the negative effect of manufacturer competition is weak and the positive effect of upward modification of perceived quality is strong, the introduction of reviews will make manufacturers raise wholesale prices, thus increasing the manufacturers' profits. In contrast, when both the negative effects of manufacturer competition and downward modification of perceived quality are strong, the introduction of reviews will lead to lower selling prices, thereby damaging the retailer's profit. Without considering customer reviews, the entry of a competitive manufacturer reduces the profit of the incumbent manufacturer, and the gross profit of the incumbent manufacturer and retailer in the market reduces. Considering customer reviews, although the entry of a competitive manufacturer still reduces the profits of the incumbent manufacturer, the gross profit increases for the incumbent manufacturer and retailer in the market.
This paper provides valuable guidance on pricing decisions and customer review introduction strategies for platform supply chain members in different competitive environments. However, it also has some limitations. Firstly, it focuses only on how reviews affect pricing decisions for products. In the future, we can continue to explore how product quality decisions and service levels are affected by reviews. Secondly, it focuses on the general supply chain, and then it can be combined with the closed-loop supply chain to explore how customer comments affect the decision and profit in the closed-loop supply chain.

Key words: customer reviews, manufacturer competition, Stackelberg game