市场营销系列学术讲座（第三十八讲）

演讲题目：Behavior-based pricing, production efficiency, and quality differentiate

演讲嘉宾： JING Bing, Associate Professor of Marketing at CKGSB

演讲时间：12月16日（周五）上午9:00-11:00

演讲地点：嘉庚一（保欣丽英楼）509室

主持人：叶军教授

摘要:

In a two-period duopoly, we examine how behavior-based price discrimination (BPD) affects the firms’ endogenous quality differentiation and profits. The firms’ relative production efficiency, defined as the ratio between their unit cost difference and quality difference, plays a critical role. With exogenous product qualities, BPD always decreases the profits of the more efficient firm, but increases those of the sufficiently less efficient firm. Anticipating its period-2 disadvantage in price discrimination, the less efficient firm competes more vigorously and also gains more in period 1 than its competitor. For the sufficiently less efficient firm, its period-1 gain dominates its period-2 loss, and its total profits increase. With endogenous quality choices, BPD does not alter the low-end quality (at the lower bound of the quality space), but increases the high-end quality, enlarging quality differentiation. This is because under BPD, each firm’s profit gain decreases (or its profit loss increases) in its relative production efficiency. Interestingly, BPD may increase both firms’ profits under endogenous quality differentiation. Aside from causing mismatch between consumers and products, we further show that BPD lowers social welfare through inducing excessive quality differentiation.

嘉宾简介：

JING Bing is an Associate Professor of Marketing at CKGSB. He earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration from University of Rochester. He previously taught at Stern School of Business at New York University. JING’s research interests include product customization, product line design and pricing, behavior-based pricing, consumer learning, and word-of-mouth marketing, etc. He is an Associate Editor at Quantitative Marketing and Economics.