Evolutionary location and pricing strategies for service merchants in competitive O2O markets
Evolutionary location and pricing strategies for service merchants in competitive O2O markets
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DOI：
10.1016/j.ejor.2016.03.030
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发表时间：
2016-10
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Zhou He;Zhou He;T. Cheng;Jichang Dong;Shouyang Wang
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Zhou He;Zhou He;T. Cheng;Jichang Dong;Shouyang Wang
随着越来越多的竞争对手进入O2O市场，吸引O2O业务的客户变得越来越困难。为了在拥挤的O2O市场中创造和保持可持续的竞争优势，需要优化联合定价-位置决策并了解客户行为。为了研究服务商的演化定位和定价行为，提出了一个基于Agent的竞争O2O模型。在该模型中，服务商被建模为利润最大化的Agent，顾客被建模为效用最大化的Agent，它们通过社交网络连接起来，通过口碑（WOM）分享他们的服务体验。研究发现，如果顾客的口碑可以忽略，服务商应该规范其服务管理，以提供一个稳定的期望。另一方面，当面对社会化程度较高的顾客时，服务品质多变的厂商应采取积极的定价与定位策略。虽然消费者的社会学习促进了O2O市场中服务的多样性，但他们的在线羊群行为会导致不可预测的离线需求变化，从而给服务商家带来绩效风险。
Attracting customers in the online-to-offline (O2O) business is increasingly difficult as more competitors are entering the O2O market. To create and maintain sustainable competitive advantage in crowded O2O markets requires optimizing the joint pricing-location decision and understanding customers’ behaviours. To investigate the evolutionary location and pricing behaviors of service merchants, this paper proposes an agent-based competitive O2O model in which the service merchants are modeled as profit-maximizing agents and customers as utility-maximizing agents that are connected by social networks through which they can share their service experiences by word of mouth (WOM). It is observed that the service merchant should standardize its service management to offer a stable expectation to customers if their WOM can be ignored. On the other hand, when facing more socialized customers, firms with variable service quality should adopt aggressive pricing and location strategies. Although customers’ social learning facilitates the diversity of services in O2O markets, their online herd behaviors would lead to unpredictable offline demand variations, which consequently pose performance risk to the service merchants.