【主讲】香港中文大学副教授周翔

【题目】直销还是间接销售？考虑战略型消费者的渠道结构和动态定价

【时间】2015年12月3日上午10:30-12:30

【地点】清华经管学院伟伦楼453

【语言】英文

【主办】管理科学与工程系

【简历】周翔老师的简历

Sean Zhou is currently an associate professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Managerial Economics, CUHK Business School, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is also the director of the Supply Chain Research Center under the Asian Institute of Supply Chain and Logistics in CUHK. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China in 2001 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from North Carolina State University in 2002 and 2006, respectively. His main research area is supply chain management with particular interests in inventory control, production planning, pricing, and game theoretic applications. He serves on the editorial board of IIE Transactions and OR Letters.

Sean Zhou, Associate Professor, CUHK Business School：Sell Directly or Indirectly? Channel Structure and Dynamic Pricing with Strategic Customers

【Speaker】Sean Zhou, Associate Professor, CUHK Business School

【Title】Sell Directly or Indirectly? Channel Structure and Dynamic Pricing with Strategic Customers

【Time】Dec.3, 10:30am-12:30pm

【Venue】Room 453, Weilun Building, Tsinghua SEM

【Language】English

【Organizer】Department of Management Science and Engineering

【Abstract】This paper studies how channel structures interact with dynamic pricing strategies and impact the profitability of firms selling to strategic customers. We consider a dual-channel supply chain where a manufacturer sells a seasonal product to strategic customers through both an independent retailer (indirect channel) and its direct channel. The manufacturer can choose to sell through the retailer in the high-price period only, the low-price period only or the whole planning horizon. During each period, if both firms work together, the manufacturer and the retailer sequentially set the wholesale and retail prices, and then the manufacturer charges the same retail price in its direct channel; otherwise, the manufacturer sets the retail price. Customers are heterogeneous in their valuation of the product and strategically decide whether and when to make the purchase. We show that in equilibrium, price skimming arises in the retail price; the wholesale price, however, may increase when customers are sufficiently strategic. To see the impact of strategic customer behavior under different channel structures, we further analyze single-channel models. We observe that the dual-channel system incurs less (more) percentage profit loss due to the strategic customer behavior than the centralized (decentralized) single channel, which implies that introducing an indirect (direct) channel makes the system less (more) vulnerable to the negative impact of the strategic behavior of customers. Meanwhile, selling through the retailer in the low-price period is more profitable than selling through the direct channel only when customers are sufficiently strategic whereas selling through the retailer only in the high-price period is most profitable for the manufacturer when customers are not very strategic and the market share of the indirect channel is low. Finally, several extensions are analyzed to test the robustness of the main insights. This is joint work with Qianbo Yin and Jiye Xue.