市场竞争与有限理性消费者

厂商如何通过对产品信息的控制以及不同的广告、营销手段来影响消费者的购买决策，长期以来都是经济学领域里一个热门的研究话题。在本课题中，我们将放宽新古典主义经济学中“理性人”的假设，结合行为经济学与市场营销学中关于消费者有限理性的前沿研究成果，对竞争性市场中企业误导、欺诈消费者的行为进行系统性的分析。特别地，我们把厂商间进行差异化竞争的一般性情形纳入到分析的范畴，从而显著地拓展了目前广受关注的行为产业组织理论的研究边界和对真实世界的解释力。通过对建立和分析一个动态的定价-营销博弈模型，我们的研究揭示了消费者真实偏好分布的性质与厂商进行迷惑性营销的激励之间深层次的理论联系。本课题的研究成果将对我国市场监管政策的制定，特别是如何通过定立行业产品标准、强制产品信息披露等监管手段去更好地保护消费者权益，提供重要的借鉴与启示。

Economists have long been interested in how firms control product information and influence consumers' decisions by using different means of advertising and marketing. In this project, we revisit this important question by relaxing the standard "rational agent" assumption in the Neoclassical economics. Building on the novel insights from the behavioral economics and the marketing literatures on consumer bounded rationality, we provide a systematic analysis on the firms' incentive to educate or obfuscate consumers. Importantly, we delineate the theory of behavioral industrial organization by incorporating the case where firms are differentiated. We show that simple properties of consumers' preference distributions are crucial in determining whether firms would engage in obfuscation in equilibrium. Our results can shed light on the optimal design of regulatory interventions, such as compulsory product standard or mandatory information disclosure.