讲座题目：Platform or Wholesale? A Strategic Tool for Online Retailers to Benefit from Product Reviews
报告人：陈建清，University of Texas at Dallas
讲座时间：2015年1月12号上午10:00-11:40
讲座地点：B226
报告人简介：Jianqing Chen is an Associate Professor at the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his Ph.D. in Management Science and Information Systems and Master of Economics from the University of Texas at Austin, Bachelor and Master of Engineering from Tsinghua University. His current research interests include Social Media and User-Generated Content, Search Engine Advertising, Economics of Information Systems, Supply Chain Risk Management and Channel Management, etc. His publications have appeared in Journal of Marketing, Information Systems Research, Productions and Operations Management, Journal of Marketing Research, MIS Quarterly, Economics Letters, etc. He has taught Social Media and Business, Electronic Business, Management Information Systems, IT in Business at the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Calgary, and the University of Texas at Austin.
讲座摘要: Online retailing is dominated by a channel structure in which a retailer either buys products from competing manufactures and resells to consumers (wholesale scheme) or lets manufacturers directly sell to consumers on its platform for a commission (platform scheme), and is characterized by easy access to product reviews to facilitate consumers’ purchase decisions. We study how different types of information revealed by reviews affect the retailer under the wholesale scheme and platform scheme. We find that information provided by reviews on quality dimension homogenizes consumers’ perceived utility differences between products and increases upstream competition, which benefits the retailer under the wholesale scheme but hurts the retailer under the platform scheme. Information provided by reviews on fit dimension heterogenizes consumers’ estimated fits to products and softens upstream competition, which hurts the retailer under the wholesale scheme and benefits the retailer under the platform scheme. Together, we demonstrate that the quality information and fit information play very different roles in changing upstream competition, and whether the retailer benefits from reviews critically depends on its pricing scheme choice.
