Abstract:

With the extension of online time-limited promotion, an urgent problem for sellers to solve is how to formulate reasonable intertemporal pricing and advertising strategies targeting consumers with different characteristics. This paper constructs a two-stage dynamic pricing and advertising model with time-sensitive customers and price-sensitive customers in online time-limited promotions. In addition, it explores the optimal pricing and advertising level of sellers under a uniform pricing strategy or differential pricing strategy and performs numerical verification on the model. It is found that sellers’ product pricing for price-sensitive consumers in the first stage is higher than that of the second stage, regardless of what pricing strategy the sellers use in the first stage. Then, the seller’s advertising level for price-sensitive consumers in the first stage is lower than that of the second stage. It is worth noticing that only when the proportion of the time-sensitive customers is higher, would the advertising level for time-sensitive consumers in the first stage be higher than that of price-sensitive consumers. Besides, the seller’s intertemporal pricing and advertising level is concerned with the proportion of time-sensitive customers regardless of what pricing strategy the sellers use in the first stage. Moreover, compared with using the uniform pricing strategy, the overall profit of the sellers under the differential pricing strategy is higher than that of the non-price discrimination strategy. Furthermore, when sellers use a uniform pricing strategy, whether the consumer surplus of time-sensitive consumers is higher than that of price-sensitive consumers is determined by the proportion of the time-sensitive customers. When sellers use a differential pricing strategy, the consumer surplus of price-sensitive consumers is significantly higher than that of time-sensitive consumers. The research results can provide theoretical suggestions for intertemporal pricing and online advertising in time-limited promotion.

Key words:

time-limited promotion, intertemporal pricing, differential pricing, targeted advertising

摘要：

随着网络限时促销周期的延长，如何根据市场中不同特征的消费者来制定合理的跨期定价与定向广告投放水平以达到利润最优，是线上商家亟待解决的问题。对此，构建了时间敏感型消费者和价格敏感型消费者并存的两阶段跨期定价与定向广告投放模型，探讨当商家在第1阶段实行统一定价或差异化定价策略下的最优跨期定价与广告投放水平，并对模型进行数值验算。研究发现：无论商家在第1阶段实行何种定价策略，其在第1阶段对价格敏感型消费者的产品定价均高于第2阶段，且商家在第1阶段对价格敏感型消费者的广告投放水平均低于第2阶段。只有当时间敏感型消费者数量的占比大于一定阈值时，商家在第1阶段对时间敏感型消费者的广告投放水平才会高于价格敏感型消费者。无论商家在第1阶段实行统一定价或差异化定价策略，商家的跨期定价与定向广告投放水平随时间敏感型消费者数量比例的变化而调整。与实行统一定价相比，商家实行差异化定价策略下的两阶段总利润更高。商家实行差异化定价策略下，价格敏感型消费者的消费者剩余显著高于时间敏感型消费者，而统一定价策略下的消费者剩余对比结果与时间敏感型消费者数量比例有关。研究结果可为线上商家在限时促销中的跨期定价与定向广告投放提供理论建议。

关键词:

限时促销, 跨期定价, 差异化定价, 定向广告投放