Abstract: With the rapid development and popularization of new technologies, consumers can obtain timely and accurate product information(such as history prices)to form a rational expectation of future prices, and then make the best purchase decision. In anticipation of a significant price drop in a desired product, consumers will delay their purchases, showing a high degree of patience and a willingness to wait until the day of the event. This phenomenon is easy to see in the 2020 China’s double 11 shopping bonanza. Many studies have shown that consumers’ strategic waiting behavior will bring a huge negative impact on corporate profits. Therefore, how to choose an appropriate pricing strategy to mitigate the negative impact of strategic consumers has become an urgent problem for senior managers to solve. In practice, the price matching strategy is a typical copping means. By promising to lower prices and offering rebates to customers who previously bought the product, it can attract more customers to spend in advance, thus effectively preventing the loss of potential profits. On the other hand, in order to improve market competitiveness, the enterprise often carries out innovation activities in various forms to reduce production costs. Therefore, in the market environment of “price transparency”, we are interested in discussing the influence of consumer patience and cost reduction on the optimal choice of product pricing strategy.
To solve this problem, we consider a situation where a monopoly sells a single product to strategic consumers. Following the previous studies, we use a popular two-period model. Specifically, for the optimal pricing strategy of monopolistic enterprise, we combine the consumers’ strategic behavior with the enterprise’ cost reduction, and construct two-period game model under the dynamic pricing strategy and the price matching strategy, respectively. Then, the advantages and disadvantages of the two pricing mechanisms are compared and analyzed. At the same time, we also deeply analyze the influence mechanism of the degree of consumer’s patience and the magnitude of cost reduction on the product prices, in order to provide some references for the enterprise’s scientific decision-making. Finally, we study the effect of different pricing strategies on market performance from the perspective of social welfare.
Through the model construction and analysis, we get some interesting conclusions: (i)Compared with dynamic pricing strategy, price matching strategy can effectively alleviate the “smart” behavior of consumers, in turn, it can bring higher profits to the enterprise. In practice, 15-day or 30-day price insurance and other means(such as 1.2 times the price insurance payout)are the use cases of price matching mechanism. (ii)Compared with the price matching strategy, although the dynamic pricing strategy will lead to the loss of potential profits, it is good for the consumer or society as a whole under certain conditions (such as a greater degree of patience and less cost reduction). (iii)In the extension part, we further consider the case that strategic consumers have price reference effect, and find that the optimal decision-making has no essential change. At the same time, the price reference effect is not disadvantageous to the enterprise under any circumstances, which is also related to the choice of pricing strategy, the degree of reference effect and other factors.
Finally, we would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC)(71572154), Service Science and Innovation Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province(KL2209)and Soft Science Project of Chengdu Science and Technology Bureau(2021-RK00-00087ZF)for their strong support for this paper. We would also like to thank anonymous peer reviewers and the editors for constructive comments on improving the quality of this paper.

Key words: dynamic pricing, price matching, strategic consumer, cost reduction

摘要： 互联网的迅猛发展为消费者的策略等待行为创造了有利条件,却给企业盈利带来巨大威胁。与此同时,企业通过创新投入、生产技术变革等手段削减成本,以提高产品的边际利润。本文将消费者耐心程度与企业成本削减相结合,并在动态定价的基础上引入差价补偿机制,进一步探讨了两种定价策略的优劣性。研究表明,与动态定价策略相比,差价补偿策略能有效缓解消费者的“聪明”行为,进而给企业带来更高收益;当耐心程度较大且成本削减幅度较小时,动态定价策略对消费者和整个社会来说都是有利的。最后,本文将模型拓展至策略型消费者具有价格参考效应的情形,并发现差价补偿策略为企业最优选择具有一定的稳健性。

关键词: 动态定价, 差价补偿, 策略型消费者, 成本削减