This paper investigates a dynamic pricing and product quality upgradation strategy for a firm with considering consumer reviews. The firm sells a new experienced product over two selling periods, in which both the firm and the consumers are initially uncertain about the product's perceived quality and have to rely on consumer reviews to update their beliefs. We uncover two strategic effects that a firm can employ to determine its optimal strategy using consumer reviews. The information precision effect determines how precisely the firm can learn the product information from the consumer reviews, and the quality adjustment effect captures the extent to which the firm can adjust its product quality based on the review realization. While the information precision effect increases with the initial level of product quality, the quality adjustment effect decreases with it. This interesting tradeoff between these two effects uniquely determines the firm’s optimal joint pricing-quality strategy during two periods, and further impacts the firm's profit and consumer surplus. Specifically, the firm’s optimal strategy in the first period, which focuses on enhancing its core effects, generates win-win scenarios for both the firm and consumers in total and the second period. Moreover, the firm’s effort to enhance information precision effect can also benefit first-period consumers, but their benefits can be completely eradicated by the firm’s pursuit to enhance its quality adjustment effect with quality upgradation. Furthermore, we discuss how the under-reporting bias, the uninformed consumers, and the strategic waiting behaviors impact the firm’s optimal strategy and consumer surplus.
06月28日
2024
07月01日
2024
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