School of Economics and Management, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing, China.
Western China Transportation Economy-Society Development Studies Center, Chongqing, China.
PLoS One. 2024 May 10;19(5):e0296654. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0296654. eCollection 2024.
In the era of the rapid development of e-commerce, many retailers choose to launch promotional activities to become consumers' first choice for shopping. Since price discounts can greatly attract consumers, the e-commerce platforms have also begun to implement discount pricing. It is urgent for e-commerce platforms and retailers to formulate reasonable discount strategies to achieve sustainable business. In this paper, we construct a dynamic game model for implementing discount pricing on an e-commerce platform and two retailers, we study the market equilibrium between the two retailers and the e-commerce platform under various scenarios that considering consumers' strategic waiting behavior and competition between the two retailers, we further discuss the effectiveness of retailer discount pricing and the double discount pricing of the platform and retailers. We show that the optimal pricing decreases as the difference in product quality narrows under both pricing strategies. Low-quality retailers implementing a double discount pricing strategy are in relatively higher demand only when the difference in product quality is small. High-quality retailers implementing the retailer discount pricing strategy are in relatively higher demand only when the product quality difference is large. Double discount pricing is desirable for both e-commerce platforms and retailers and can be used to effectively achieve Pareto improvement in the market by increasing their expected profit. Our results emphasize the role of product quality and the value of the double discount pricing strategy. The double discount pricing strategy weakens the profit advantage that retailers and platforms gain from it as the rebate intensity and rebate redemption rates increase.
在电子商务迅速发展的时代，许多零售商选择开展促销活动，以成为消费者购物的首选。由于价格折扣可以极大地吸引消费者，电子商务平台也开始实行折扣定价。电子商务平台和零售商迫切需要制定合理的折扣策略，以实现可持续的业务。在本文中，我们构建了一个电子商务平台和两家零售商实施折扣定价的动态博弈模型，研究了在考虑消费者策略性等待行为和两家零售商竞争的各种情况下，两家零售商和电子商务平台之间的市场均衡，进一步讨论了零售商折扣定价和平台及零售商双重折扣定价的有效性。研究结果表明，在这两种定价策略下，最优定价随着产品质量差异的缩小而降低。在两种定价策略下，只有当产品质量差异较小时，实施双重折扣定价策略的低质量零售商的需求才会相对较高。只有当产品质量差异较大时，实施零售商折扣定价策略的高质量零售商的需求才会相对较高。双重折扣定价对电子商务平台和零售商都是可取的，可以通过提高预期利润，有效地实现市场的帕累托改进。我们的研究结果强调了产品质量的作用和双重折扣定价策略的价值。随着回扣强度和回扣赎回率的增加，双重折扣定价策略削弱了零售商和平台从中获得的利润优势。
