消费者寻求多样化与厂商折扣定价竞争

在很多市场环境中，消费者喜欢尝试不同产品的特性，重复消费同一商品会产生滞留成本。本文通过构建两期动态博弈模型，研究了滞留成本对企业折扣券定价行为的影响，并与其他定价策略的市场绩效进行了比较。本文研究结果表明：（1）企业会通过折扣券奖励忠诚的消费者，即企业会对重复购买自己产品的消费者给予价格优惠，而对新消费者制定高价格；（2）在均衡中，随着滞留成本的提升，消费者剩余和社会总福利降低，企业利润上升；（3）与其他定价机制相比较，折扣券定价策略下的社会总福利较低，政策制定者应当限制此类策略的应用。

Consumers' Variety Seeking and Firms' Coupon Pricing Strategy

It is easy to observe that consumers tend to be variety-seeking in a lot of markets, such as catering industry, tourist industry and fashion industry. In these industries, if an agent consumes the same product or service twice, he may be faced with utility loss. This kind of utility loss is called "staying cost". In addition, it can be also observed that many firms often use coupon pricing strategy. Coupon pricing strategy means that firms give its consumers a discount coupon, they will get discount price when they come to purchase next time. In this paper, this marketing strategy made by firms with consumers' variety-seeking as well as the effect of this behavior on the social welfare is mainly analyzed.A two period duopoly model is developed based on Hotelling framework. The case is considered that duopoly firms can offer coupons to its consumers in the first period and they will get a discount price if they come to purchase in the second period. But at the same time loyal consumers will suffer from a utility loss. And if they choose the other firm in the second period, they have to pay the original price.In the first part of this paper, a two stage model is developed to solve the sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium. The equilibrium shows that:(1) under the coupon pricing scheme, firms can offer discount coupon to its consumers for second purchasing, and charge original price to new consumers. (2) The behavior of consumers' variety-seeking will weaken competition between firms in the first period.In the first part of this paper, welfare analysis is made for the equilibrium outcome. The comparative static analysis is made for consumer surplus, firms' profits and social welfare. And it is found that consumer surplus and social welfare will rise with increase of staying cost. But firm's profit will fall at the same time. Compared with other pricing schemes, such as uniform pricing, discrimination pricing and pre-commitment pricing, consumer surplus under coupon pricing is greater than other pricing schemes.In general, our model can make a good explanation for many economic facts and firms' strategic behaviors, and further make some significant suggestions for the firms' marketing strategy.