关键词: 产品估值不确定, 预期后悔, 消费者退货, 投机行为, 展厅

Abstract: In recent years, online shopping has been favored by more and more consumers, but consumers cannot directly contact the product before online shopping to understand the product information, and only after receiving the product can they find that the product is not suitable, especially for experiential products such as clothing, so consumers can clearly know whether they meet their expectations only after practical contact. To a certain extent, this reduces consumers’ purchase willingness and inhibits consumers’ purchase. In order to increase consumer confidence in stimulating consumers to actively buy products, online retailers led by JD, on the basis of the “no reason for return” guarantee, put forward a full refund return policy, allowing consumers to return products within a certain period of time and get a full refund.
With the intensification of market competition and the acceleration of product update frequency, online retailers often implement a series of discount promotions to attract consumers to buy, and the development of information technology has intensified the strategic purchasing behavior of consumers. However, in the case of the full refund return guarantee, when the return cost is ignored, the loose return guarantee may breed the opportunistic behavior of consumers who buy the product at the full price after knowing the value of the product, and wait until the discount period to buy it again at a low price, which reduces the profit of online retailers to some extent. In the two-stage sales environment, considering that consumers’ strategic choice of purchase time is also affected by high price regret and out-of-stock regret, such anticipated regret behavior will affect consumers’ strategic choice of purchase time. Therefore, when consumers’ speculation is also considered, how will the anticipated regret behavior affect consumers’ purchase and return decisions? And how will it affect online retailers?
In view of this kind of speculation of purposeful purchase and return, considering the speculation and expected regret of consumers under the return guarantee, this paper discusses the influence of introducing showroom mechanism on consumers’ purchase decisions, and then discusses retailers’ pricing strategies and operational decisions according to consumers’ different maximum reserve prices for products.
The first part divides strategic consumers into two types: (1)opportunistic consumers: they compare the economic utility of retained products and opportunistic returns at the time of purchase; (2)opportunistic regret consumers: their purchase is not only affected by the comparison of economic utility, but also by the psychological utility brought by the expected regret behavior. We consider the impact of consumer expected regret on purchase timing.
In the second part, according to the purchasing behavior of consumers, the reserve price of opportunistic consumers and opportunistic regret consumers is calculated respectively under different purchasing situations, and the size of the reserve price of opportunistic consumers and opportunistic regret consumers under different circumstances is compared according to the product matching rate and the degree of regret, and the high and low value consumers are distinguished. The pricing strategy of online retailers is given.
In the third part, the rational expectation hypothesis is used to analyze the equilibrium problem between retailers and consumers, considering the profit model of online retailers under different purchase situations, and the optimal retail price, optimal order quantity and optimal expected profit of online retailers are solved and discussed through numerical analysis under different pricing strategies.
Based on the above research, the following conclusions can be drawn: (1)Although the return guarantee may breed the opportunistic behavior of consumers to purchase and return goods with purpose, the showroom mechanism can eliminate such opportunistic behavior of consumers to a certain extent. (2)Only when the cost of inconvenience is low, consumers will choose to go to the physical showroom. (3)When strategic consumers are opportunistic, there are cases of inconsistent purchase decision preferences between opportunistic regret consumers and opportunistic consumers. (4)The higher retail price is not always better, the retailer’s optimal order volume and optimal profit under penetration pricing strategy are not always better than those under skimming pricing strategy, and the product matching rate and consumer proportion directly affect the retailer’s sales price setting and pricing strategy selection.

Key words: product value uncertainty, anticipated regret, consumer returns, opportunistic behavior, showroom