Will More Purchasing Options Benefit Customers?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Elmaghraby, Wedad; Lippman, Steven A.; Tang, Christopher S.; Yin, Rui
• 署名单位: University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Arizona State University; Arizona State University-Tempe
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1937-5956.2009.01041.x
• 发表日期: 2009
• 页码: 381-401
• 关键词: Retailing; reservation; contingent sales; callable products; revenue management

摘要

This paper considers the sale of a seasonal product in the face of strategic customers. At the beginning of the selling season, the retailer announces both the price p(h) at which the product will be sold during the selling season and the post-season clearance price p(l) < p(h) for unsold items. We analyze two operating regimes: The no reservation regime'' allows a buyer either to purchase the product at price ph when he arrives or to enter a lottery to purchase at price p(l) if the product remains unsold. The reservation regime'' offers each buyer one extra option than the no reservation regime: reserve the product for purchase at the clearance price p(l). If the buyer reserves the product under the reservation regime and if it remains unsold at the end of the selling season, then he is obligated to purchase it at price p(l). We consider a situation in which heterogeneous customers with probabilistic valuation arrive in accord with a Poisson process. We characterize the rational purchasing behavior wherein each arriving customer is strategic; each customer takes other customers' purchasing behavior into consideration. By considering the Nash equilibrium of this game, we show that strategic customer behavior can render the customer to be worse off and the retailer to be better off under the reservation regime, despite the fact that this regime offers one extra option (reservation) to a customer. Hence, more purchasing options do not necessarily benefit customers.