消费者品牌忠诚对品牌商再制造市场策略的影响

独立再制造商IR的市场进入给品牌商带来了显著的竞争压力。品牌忠诚源于消费者对某个产品品牌的信任和特殊情感,在产品选择中具有明显的倾向性和排他性,进一步增加了品牌商市场策略的复杂性。针对这一现象,本文采用博弈论结合数值仿真研究了消费者具有品牌忠诚特性下的品牌商再制造市场策略问题。建立并求解了IR不进入且品牌商不再制造（n）、IR不进入且品牌商再制造（nR）、IR进入且品牌商不再制造（nr）、IR进入且品牌商再制造（nrR）四种市场模式,对模型结果进行了灵敏度分析,并探讨了各成员的模式偏好。研究表明：新产品价格、品牌再制品价格、一般再制品价格均与品牌忠诚度正相关;品牌忠诚度的提高一定增大品牌商的利润,但不一定会降低IR利润;当新产品制造成本较高时,品牌商的模式偏好始终为nR$\succ$nrR$\succ$n$\succ$nr,较低时模式偏好受到消费者品牌忠诚度的大小的影响;nr和nrR模式下,品牌忠诚度仅可能提高品牌消费者剩余,但会降低普通消费者剩余、总消费者剩余和社会总福利。     

The Potential for Cannibalization of New Products Sales by Remanufactured Products*

The potential for cannibalization of new product sales by remanufactured versions of the same product is a central issue in the continuing development of closed‐loop supply chains. Practitioners have no fact‐based information to guide practice at firms and academics have no studies available to use as the basis for assumptions in models. We address the cannibalization issue by using auctions to determine consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for both new and remanufactured products. The auctions also allow us to better understand the potential impact of offering new and remanufactured products at the same time, which provides us insights into the potential for new product cannibalization. Our results indicate that, for the consumer and commercial products auctioned, there is a clear difference in WTP) for new and remanufactured goods. For the consumer product, there is scant overlap in bidders between the new and remanufactured products, leading us to conclude that the risk of cannibalization in this case is minimal. For the commercial product, there is evidence of overlap in bidding behavior, exposing the potential for cannibalization.     

闭环供应链再制品消费补贴政策模型分析

本文从政府提供消费补贴以鼓励消费者选择购买再制品的视角,构建了政府消费补贴下的闭环供应链博弈模型,得到了政府的最优消费补贴策略,并探讨了政府消费补贴政策对闭环供应链新品与再制品的定价、供应链总利润、消费者剩余、社会福利的影响。研究结果表明：1）只有满足特定条件时,政府才需提供再制品消费补贴;2）政府的消费补贴在制造商和消费者之间进行平均分配,因而补贴政策对制造商和消费者均有激励作用;3）政府消费补贴政策有利于供应链总利润、消费者剩余、社会福利的提高;4）政府应引导制造商专注于再制造,将废旧品的回收交由第三方回收商来完成,这有利于提高废旧产品的回收率;5）政府消费补贴政策将造成再制品对新品的市场挤兑效应。论文最后利用数值试验对研究结果进行了验证。     

考虑奢侈与环保偏好的再制造品最优定价策略

把奢侈、环保偏好消费者考虑到再制造品市场需求中,研究了奢侈与环保消费者构成市场的再制造品最优定价策略,发现奢侈与环保偏好消费者比例不同的市场再制造品最优定价存在差异,并且差异价格随着消费者比例不同有所不同;同时发现在价格歧视的边界上,即奢侈消费者与绿色消费者比例存在某种特定关系时,差异价格可以获得相同的利润,却可以得到不同再制造品数量,这为制造商在利润不受损下,实现社会环保目标、提升绿色形象创造了一条路径。然后根据上述的不同的市场结构特征,建议制造商采取相应价格歧视策略,并通过算例验证了上述的结论。     

The Impact of Limited Supply on a Firm's Bundling Strategy

A firm's two‐product bundling decision is examined when the supply of one product is limited and consumer valuations are normally distSteckeributed. The firm can choose to sell products separately and/or through a bundle. We find that the impact of limited supply on a firm's bundling decision depends on the correlation between the consumer valuations of the two products as well as the symmetry level of the two products in terms of their attractiveness (how much they are valued by consumers). When the valuation correlation is high and the symmetry level of the two products is low, limited supply can drive bundling. When the valuation correlation is low or the symmetry level is high, limited supply can drive no bundling. When the attractiveness of both products are low or the valuation correlation is very high, limited supply has no impact on a firm's bundling decision: The firm should not bundle for all supply levels. This study offers a new driver for product bundling: the limited supply of a product. The existing bundling literature suggests that a firm should bundle symmetric products that have a low consumer valuation correlation, when bundling is driven by consumer valuation heterogeneity reduction. In contrast, when bundling is driven by limited supply, a firm should bundle asymmetric products with a high consumer valuation correlation. The benefit of supply‐driven bundling depends on the severity of supply limitation. When supply limitation is moderate, bundling creates value by expanding the market of the less attractive product. When supply limitation is severe, bundling enables a firm to extract a higher margin from the less attractive product.     

The Impact of Geographic Proximity on What to Buy,How to Buy,and Where to Buy: Evidence from High‐Tech Durable Goods Market*

Social contagion effects due to geographical proximity refer to the social effects wherein the behavior of an individual varies with the behavior of other individuals who are geographically close. Although the influence of such effects on consumer choices has been established in several contexts, much of the extant studies have focused on its effect on consumers’ decision of whether to buy a new product or adopt a new innovation. There has been no systematic examination of the influence of geographic proximity on other aspects of consumers’ product buying process such as what to buy (i.e., brand choice), how to buy (i.e., the channel), and where to buy (i.e., retailers). Such effects can matter significantly in high‐technology and durable goods markets and therefore, it is critical to understand the scope of these on consumers’ choice of retailers and channel as well. Drawing on literatures from word of mouth effects, ecommerce, and consumers’ perception of risk in their purchase process, we develop a set of hypotheses on the effect of geographic proximity on consumers’ choices of what to buy, how to buy, and where to buy. Leveraging a microlevel dataset of purchases of personal computers, we develop brand‐, retailer‐, and channel‐related measures of proximity effects at the individual consumer level and estimate a joint disaggregate model of the three choices that make up a product purchase process to test these hypotheses. Our results indicate a significant contagion effect on each of the three choices. Furthermore, we find evidence of a greater effect of geographic proximity on inexperienced consumers—those who are new to the product category. Our results thus help develop a holistic understanding of the influence of social contagion effects on consumers’ decision making.     

Revenue and Cost Management for Remanufactured Products

This paper considers pricing and remanufacturing strategy of a firm that decides to offer both new and remanufactured versions of its product in the market and is concerned with demand cannibalization. We present a model of demand cannibalization and a behavioral study that estimates a key modeling parameter: a fraction of consumers who switch from new to remanufactured product. As we show, this fraction has an inverted‐U shape, and, thus, the underlying consumer behavior cannot be modeled using the standard methodologies that rely on consumers' willingness to pay (WTP). We find that by incorporating the inverted‐U‐shaped consumer behavior, the firm remanufactures under broader conditions, charges a much lower price, and typically remanufactures more units—leading to an increase of profits from remanufacturing by up to a factor of two as compared with making decisions based on the WTP only. Lastly, we find that the behavior of the low‐price market segment plays an important role because the firm reacts to it differently than the WTP‐based logic would suggest.     

Take‐Back Legislation: Consequences for Remanufacturing and Environment

In the last two decades, many countries have enacted product take‐back legislation that holds manufacturers responsible for the collection and environmentally sound treatment of end‐of‐use products. In an industry regulated by such legislation, we consider a manufacturer that also sells remanufactured products under its brand name. Using a stylized model, we consider three levels of legislation: no take‐back legislation, legislation with collection targets, and legislation with collection and reuse targets. We characterize the optimal solution for the manufacturer and analyze how various levels of legislation affect manufacturing, remanufacturing, and collection decisions. First, we explore whether legislation with only collection targets causes an increase in remanufacturing levels, which is argued to be an environmentally friendlier option for end‐of‐use treatment than other options such as recycling. While increased remanufacturing alone is usually perceived as a favorable environmental outcome, if one considers the overall environmental impact of new and remanufactured products, this might not be the case. To study this issue, we model the environmental impact of the product following a life cycle analysis–based approach. We characterize the conditions under which increased remanufacturing due to take‐back legislation causes an increase in total environmental impact. Finally, we model the impact of legislation on consumer surplus and manufacturer profits and identify when total welfare goes down because of legislation.     

Effects of Remanufacturable Product Design on Market Segmentation and the Environment

Despite documented benefits of remanufacturing, many manufacturers have yet to embrace the idea of tapping into remanufactured‐goods markets. In this article, we explore this dichotomy and analyze the effect of remanufacturable product design on market segmentation and product and trade‐in prices by studying a two‐stage profit‐maximization problem in which a price‐setting manufacturer can choose whether or not to open a remanufactured‐goods market for its product. Our results suggest that it is optimal for a manufacturer to design a remanufacturable product when the value‐added from remanufacturing is relatively high but product durability is relatively low and innovation is nominal. In addition, we find that entering a remanufactured‐goods market in and of itself does not necessarily translate into environmental friendliness. On the one hand, the optimal trade‐in program could result in low return and/or remanufacturing rates. On the other hand, a low price for remanufactured products could attract higher demand and thereby potentially result in more damage to the environment. Meanwhile, external restrictions imposed on total greenhouse gas emissions draw criticism in their own right because they risk stifling growth or reducing overall consumer welfare. Given these trade‐offs, we therefore develop and compare several measures of environmental efficiency and conclude that emissions per revenue can serve as the best proxy for emissions as a metric for measuring overall environmental stewardship.     

Mass Customization and Guardrails: “You Can Not Be All Things to All People”

A mass customization strategy enables a firm to match its product designs to unique consumer tastes. In a classic horizontal product‐differentiation framework, a consumer's utility is a decreasing function of the distance between their ideal taste and the taste defined by the most closely aligned product the firm offers. A consumer thus considers the taste mismatch associated with their purchased product, but otherwise the positioning of the firm's product portfolio (or, “brand image”) is immaterial. In contrast, self‐congruency theory suggests that consumers assess how well both the purchased product and its overall brand image match with their ideal taste. Therefore, we incorporate within the consumer utility function both product‐specific and brand‐level components. Mass customization has the potential to improve taste alignment with regard to a specific purchased product, but at the risk of increasing brand dilution. Absent brand dilution concerns, a firm will optimally serve all consumers’ ideal tastes at a single price. In contrast, by endogenizing dilution costs within the consumer utility model, we prove that a mass‐customizing firm optimally uses differential pricing. Moreover, we show that the firm offers reduced prices to consumers with extreme tastes (to stimulate consumer “travel”), with a higher and fixed price being offered to those consumers having more central (mainstream) tastes. Given that a continuous spectrum of prices will likely not be practical in application, we also consider the more pragmatic approach of augmenting the uniformly priced mass customization range with preset (non‐customized) outlying designs, which serve customers at the taste extremes. We prove this practical approach performs close to optimal.     

考虑消费者环保意识与政府补贴的企业绿色技术创新决策研究

在绿色经济时代，绿色技术创新已经成为越来越多企业获取竞争优势的途径。本文基于消费者需求偏好，在不同的政府补贴情形下，构建了包含绿色产品与普通产品生产企业的双寡头竞争模型和斯塔克博格模型，分析了企业绿色技术创新驱动因素和行动时机。研究表明：消费者环保意识有助于提升绿色产品市场份额和企业利润，而绿色产品的单位成本增加会降低其市场份额和企业利润，且绿色产品的单位成本与普通产品企业的利润呈倒U型关系；政府对绿色产品的补贴，可以促进企业绿色技术创新。补贴消费者与补贴企业两种方式下产品的市场份额和社会总福利相同，考虑到补贴的执行成本，补贴消费者更优；绿色产品生产企业作为追随者时，绿色产品的市场占有率最高，社会总福利也最高，因此，后发行动策略是企业绿色技术创新的占优行动策略。     

炫耀性产品品牌策略：品牌延伸或新品牌？

企业在推出炫耀性产品时，可以采用两种品牌策略：品牌延伸或新品牌。为分析企业的炫耀性产品品牌策略，通过博弈论本文建立了无新产品、品牌延伸和新品牌三种模型，并得到了垄断情形与竞争情形下企业在不同品牌策略下的最优定价和利润。研究发现：在垄断情形下，企业总是采用品牌延伸策略。而在面临企业竞争时，如果消费者对地位身份不敏感，则企业选择不推出新产品；如果消费者对身份地位敏感，则当创建新品牌成本较小时，企业采用新品牌策略，否则企业选择放弃推出新产品。此外，一定条件下，企业推出新品牌会增加竞争对手的利润。     

政府补贴下制造/再制造竞争机理研究

以政府“以旧换再”补贴政策为背景,建立了原始制造商、再制造商与零售商两阶段博弈模型.基于此博弈模型,考虑政府不采取补贴政策、政府补贴给再制造商及政府通过零售商补贴购买再制造产品消费者3种情况,对比分析了政府不同补贴策略对两种产品单位批发价格、零售价格、销售量、利润、消费者剩余及环境的影响.结果表明:当再制造产品的需求不受废旧产品回收量限制,政府补贴可以降低两种产品单位零售价格,增加再制造商和零售商的利润,提高消费者的剩余;当再制造产品的需求受到废旧产品回收量限制时,政府补贴可以增加两种产品的单位批发价格和两种产品制造商的利润,但是会降低零售商的销售利润.     

Optimal Policies for Selling New and Remanufactured Products

Because of environmental and economic reasons, an increasing number of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) nowadays sell both new and remanufactured products. When both products are available, customers will buy the one that gives them a higher (and non‐negative) utility. Thus, if the firm does not price the products properly, then product cannibalization may arise and its revenue may be adversely impacted. In this paper, we study the pricing problem of a firm that sells both new and remanufactured products over a finite planning horizon. Customer demand processes for both new and remanufactured products are random and price‐sensitive, and product returns (also called cores) are random and remanufactured upon receipt. We characterize the optimal pricing and manufacturing policies that maximize the expected total discounted profit. If new products are made‐to‐order (MTO), we show that when the inventory level of remanufactured product increases, the optimal price of remanufactured product decreases while the price difference between new and remanufactured products increases; however, the optimal selling price of new product may increase or decrease. If new products are made to stock (MTS), then the optimal manufacturing policy is of a base‐stock policy with the base‐stock level decreasing in the remanufactured product inventory level. To understand the potential benefit in implementing an MTO system, we study the difference between the value functions of the MTO and MTS systems, and develop lower and upper bounds for it. Finally, we study several extensions of the base model and show that most of our results extend to those more general settings.     

Marketing Strategies and Market Prospects for Environmentally-Friendly Consumer Products1

Recent evidence suggests that the extent of consumer adoption of ‘green’ products is much less than would be indicated by the enthusiastic opinion poll evidence concerning public attitudes towards environmentally-friendly consumption. This paper reports on an empirical analysis of firms' marketing strategies and their influence on consumer demand for green products. In twenty 2–3 hour interviews with senior managers, four representative groups of markets were analysed household detergents, paper (recycled), petrol (unleaded) and automobile technology (focusing on catalytic converters). According to managers, firms' marketing strategies influenced consumer demand by making green technologies available in the fwst instance. However, barriers to supplying green products that show panty with, or better performance than, conventional technologies constrain pricing and communication efforts Managers stressed that, in the absence of clarity of green products' environmental benefits, product performance and other attributes, not green benefits, remain the main determinants of product preference and choice. Promotions focused much more on consumers than distribution channels, yet channel acceptance and support of green innovations are paramount in facilitating sales. Firms see the costs of generating and promoting desirable green technologies as barriers to diffusion in the immediate future. Legislation and/or economic incentives may help, but manufacturers are not optimistic that future green consumption rates will accelerate. The results also highlight several propositions concerning the discrepancy between consumer environmental concerns and purchasing actions which warrant further testing: there is mis-specification of green products in relation to consumers'needs; there are barriers to perceptions of green products' environmental impact and consumers' free ride due to individual self-interest.     

Joint Life‐Cycle Dynamics of New and Remanufactured Products

Many products considered for remanufacturing are durables that exhibit a well‐pronounced product life cycle—they diffuse gradually through the market. The remanufactured product, which is a cheaper substitute for the new product, is often put on the market during the life cycle of the new product and affects its sales dynamics. In this paper, we study the integrated dynamic management of a portfolio of new and remanufactured products that progressively penetrate a potential market over the product life cycle. To this end, we extend the Bass diffusion model in a way that maintains the two essential features of remanufacturing settings: (a) substitution between new and remanufactured products, and (b) a constraint on the diffusion of remanufactured products due to the limited supply of used products that can be remanufactured. We identify characteristics of the diffusion paths of new and remanufactured products. Finally, we analyze the impact of levers such as remanufacturability level, capacity profile and reverse channel speed on profitability.     

产品危害事件对品牌资产变动的影响

本文采用达沃和皮洛特的分析框架和两项实验,探索了产品危害事件中公司反应和消费者先前预期是如何影响品牌资产变动的。结果发现,消费者对公司反应的解释取决于其先前预期:出现产品危害事件时,不管公司采用何种反应措施,强预期条件下较弱预期条件下造成的品牌资产损失小。     

“名字”,还是“卖点”,消费者如何加工双重信息?

在营销实践中存在大量的仿洋和仿古品牌名称,因为品牌名称作为信息确实会影响消费者的认知和态度。基于信息加工的角度,本文探讨了消费者如何加工品牌名称等多重信息。通过实验研究发现品牌名称与产品功能诉求在互补型匹配时传播效果更好,而且其效果具有一般性。这一结果有助于在更抽象的信息加工层面理解仿洋和仿古品牌名称的应用效果,因而更好地调控消费者的反应。     

A Model of Consumers' Risk Perceptions Toward Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rbGH): The Impact of Risk Characteristics

This study estimates the effect risk characteristics, described as outrage factors by Hadden, have on consumers' risk perceptions toward the food-related biotechnology, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH). The outrage factors applicable to milk from rbGH treated herds are involuntary risk exposure, unfamiliarity with the product's production process, unnatural product characteristics, lack of trust in regulator's ability to protect consumers in the marketplace, and consumers' inability to distinguish milk from rbGH treated herds compared to milk from untreated herds. An empirical analysis of data from a national survey of household food shoppers reveals that outrage factors mediate risk perceptions. The results support the inclusion of outrage factors into the risk perception model for the rbGH product, as they add significantly to the explanatory power of the model and therefore reduce bias compared to a simpler model of attitudinal and demographic factors. The study indicates that outrage factors which have a significant impact on risk perceptions are the lack of trust in the FDA as a food-related information source, and perceiving no consumer benefits from farmers' use of rbGH. Communication strategies to reduce consumer risk perceptions therefore could utilize agencies perceived as more trustworthy and emphasize the benefits of rbGH use to consumers.