The Promise of Strategic Customer Behavior: On the Value of Click Tracking

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Huang, Tingliang; Van Mieghem, Jan A.
• 署名单位: University of London; University College London; Northwestern University
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1937-5956.2012.01386.x
• 发表日期: 2013
• 页码: 489-502
• 关键词: click tracking; Customer Behavior; advance demand information; game theory

摘要

Click tracking is gaining in popularity, and the practice of web analytics is growing fast. Whether strategic customers are willing to visit a website when they know their clicks may be tracked is an important yet complex problem, which depends on various factors. Using a newsvendor framework, we examine this problem by focusing on the operational factor: how product availability induces strategic customers to voluntarily provide advance demand information. We find that a strong Nash equilibrium exists where every customer is willing to click, and customer incentives to click are robust to noise. Hence, we demonstrate the promise of strategic customer behavior in the context of click tracking, contrary to the conventional wisdom that it is typically a peril for the firm. Notably, click tracking is typically advantageous to both the firm and its customers, compared with other strategies such as advance selling, quantity commitment, availability guarantees, and quick response. Lastly, we extend to two settings by including marketing decisions, price-sensitive demand and markdown pricing, and discuss how operations and marketing decisions interact in influencing the value of click tracking.