College of Management and Economics

About: College of Management and Economics is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supply chain & Stock market. The organization has 2184 authors who have published 2193 publications receiving 28830 citations.

Reveal or hide? Impact of demonstration on pricing decisions considering showrooming behavior

Abstract: Unlike online stores, offline stores can provide product demonstration services, such as product display, product fit, and other kinds of in-store solutions, to help consumers understand the suitability of products. Consumers are increasingly using offline stores to obtain in-store demonstration services and then switching to online stores to purchase the product. This behavior is called “showrooming.” This study considers the pricing problem in a dual-channel supply chain with an online retailer and a manufacturer that owns an offline direct sales store. The manufacturer's product has digital attributes that can be evaluated through both online and offline channels, as well as non-digital attributes that can be evaluated only through in-store product demonstration. We investigate the impacts of the demonstration informativeness on online and offline retail pricing decisions under showrooming behavior. Given the demonstration informativeness and other relevant factors, we then compare the outcomes of the manufacturer's strategies on whether to demonstrate and the retailer's strategies on whether to avoid showrooming. We find that showrooming behavior may be beneficial to the manufacturer that owns an offline store and harmful to the online retailer. When the demonstration informativeness level is medium, the manufacturer will be better off choosing the non-demonstration strategy, and the online retailer will select the non-showrooming strategy. We also show that, in comparison to exogenous wholesale prices, when the manufacturer sets the wholesale price endogenously, it helps the two firms choose the same strategy; moreover, the endogenous wholesale price leads to Pareto improvement in the supply chain.

Quality, Pricing, and Release Time: Optimal Market Entry Strategy for Software-as-a-Service Vendors

Abstract: As a new software licensing model, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is gaining tremendous popularity across the globe. In this study, we investigate the competition between a new entrant and an incumbent in an SaaS market, and derive the optimal market entry strategy for the new entrant. One interesting finding is that, when its product quality is significantly lower than that of the incumbent, the new entrant should adopt an instant-release strategy (i.e., releasing its product at the start of the planning horizon). If the initial quality gap of the two products is small, the new entrant is better off adopting a late-release strategy (i.e., deferring the release of the new product until its quality surpasses that of the existing product). We also find that instant-release and late-release are essentially low-quality/low-price and high-quality/high-price strategies, respectively. In addition, we explore the scenario where the two competing products are partially compatible, and characterize the impact of asymmetric incompatibility on the two vendors’ market strategies at equilibrium. We find that the new entrant’s zero-profit region expands as the level of incompatibility between the two competing products increases. Moreover, if the new entrant adopts the instant-release strategy, its profit decreases with the level of incompatibility. When the level of incompatibility is sufficiently high, the instant-release strategy may not be viable for the new entrant. On the other hand, if the new entrant adopts the late-release strategy, its profit increases with the level of incompatibility from its product to the incumbent’s, but decreases with the level of incompatibility in the other direction.

A scheduling model of logistics service supply chain based on the mass customization service and uncertainty of FLSP’s operation time

Abstract: Building on previous research, this paper establishes a new multi-objective program scheduling model of Logistics service supply chain that considers the uncertainty of operation time for functional logistics service providers (FLSPs) in a mass customization service environment. This model aims to minimize total scheduling costs, minimize the difference between the scheduled and actual time of each service process, and maximize the average satisfaction of FLSPs. Considering the differences in target priority, the goal programming method is applied to solve the model hierarchically. In addition, the effects of scheduling parameters on scheduling objectives are provided after numerical analysis.