Intertemporal Product Management with Strategic Consumers: The Value of Defective Product Returns

Problem definition: An increased incidence of quality issues, resulting in defective product returns (DPRs), is a concern for firms bringing innovative products to market. Although a firm can recover value from DPRs through refurbishing, consumers are known to act strategically in anticipation of the future availability of refurbished units. We study a firm’s strategy for offering a new product and refurbished DPRs to strategic consumers across time. Academic/practical relevance: Aided by emerging shopping tools, an increasing number of consumers consider buying refurbished versions of products rather than their new counterparts. A novel contribution of our work is the recognition of the refurbishing of DPRs as a possible solution to the time inconsistency problem that arises when a firm offers products to strategic consumers across time. We characterize how the product line decisions and profit of the firm are influenced by the defect rate, the perceived quality of refurbished DPRs, and consumers’ hassle cost of returns. Methodology: We develop a two-period game-theoretic model to characterize the firm offering the new product and refurbished DPRs to strategic consumers across time. Results: The refurbishing of DPRs helps the firm implicitly commit to limiting the quantity of the new product offered in the future, allowing the firm to charge a premium for the new product today. As a result, firm profit may even increase with the defect rate. These results persist across various model extensions. Managerial implications: Whereas the firm’s profit is the highest when there are no defects, opportunities to achieve marginal reductions in defect rates may not be worth the investment and may even be counterproductive. Also, efforts toward enhancing the perceived quality of the refurbished product or decreasing the hassle cost for consumers may better serve the firm than efforts toward marginally improving defect rates.

Managing a 5G mobile phone supply chain under the impact of strategic consumers: A two-period game analysis and applications

Consumers' strategic purchasing behavior has a great influence on the pricing and sales of new products. In order to study the impact of strategic consumers on the sales of 5G mobile phones, we establish a two-period pricing model. The supply chain contains two manufacturers, a communications operator and a mobile phone retailer. Cases where two manufacturers have the same or different pricing rights are researched by using the Stackelberg game and the Nash game model. Our research results are as follows:(1) We obtain the optimal 5G communication fees in two periods and find out how they change with the proportion of consumers changing. (2) We figure out the profits of the supply chain in two periods and analyze them. We find that the communication operator earns more than the others most of the time. (3) We investigate how the proportion of strategic consumer impact on supply chain profits and conclude that the optimal price and demand in a period will decrease as the proportion of consumers who only purchase products in the other period increases.

The Pricing Decision and Channel Choice of Upgraded Products in the Presence of Strategic Consumers

Many dual-channel suppliers need to make appropriate strategies for their upgraded products in the presence of strategic consumers. This paper develops a two-period dynamic game framework to explore the optimal pricing and upgrade the channel choice when the supplier introduces new upgraded products to a market populated by strategic consumers. The results show that, under any upgrade channel choice, the strategic consumers’ behavior has impacts on supplier and retailer’s pricing decisions and reduces their profit. The supplier could choose appropriate upgrade channel to improve his performance according to the consumers’ patience and innovation level of upgrade products. The supplier should choose pure offline channel to upgrade products when the innovation level of upgraded product B is relatively small. With the sufficiently high innovation level, the supplier should adopt pure offline channel to upgrade products when consumers’ patience is low and uses dual-channel upgrade strategy when the patience is high enough.

Two-Stage Pricing Decision for Low-Carbon Products Based on Consumer Strategic Behaviour

The development of information technology has changed the pricing strategy of retailers, and consumers have also made strategic consumption behaviours accordingly. At the same time, changes in the environment have caused changes in the retailer’s products and raised consumers’ environmental awareness. This paper uses a two-stage pricing model to study the low-carbon product pricing decisions of retailers based on strategic consumers with low-carbon preferences in two situations. Through the analysis of low-carbon and ordinary products in two situations, the following conclusions can be drawn: (1) In a market where retailers only sell low-carbon products, product prices and profits increase as consumers’ green preference θ increases. (2) In the low-carbon product and ordinary product markets, the price and profit of low-carbon products increase with regard to consumers’ green preference θ . (3) In the second stage, when consumers’ intertemporal discount factor β for ordinary products is larger than that of low-carbon products, the retailer’s total profit is smaller. The research conclusion comprehensively analyses the impact of customer strategic behaviour on the two-stage pricing decision of green differentiated products, which provides a very important reference for retailers to make pricing optimization decisions.