Research On Information Disclosure Strategies Of Online Retailers Considering Free-riding Behavior Of Consumers

With the rapid development and wide application of information technology and logistics technology,e-commerce industry has made full progress and has become an important pillar in the field of digital economy.As an important component of e-commerce,online shopping has been fully trusted by consumers.However,the lack of online product information in online shopping may make consumers fail to fully discover the high value of online products,so they give up buying or turn to offline retailers to buy products.Online retailers have realized the important influence of online product information on consumers’ online shopping decisions,and they have adopted a series of strategies to facilitate the disclosure of product information on the website,so as to facilitate consumers to obtain product information on the website and ease the difficulty of product matching in the online shopping process.However,it is debatable whether the promotion of product disclosure by online retailers will necessarily increase profits.Firstly,the facilitation of product information disclosure by the online retailer will change the inherent pattern of product information between online and offline channels,and whether this will intensify the commercial competition between online and offline retailers remains to be seen.Secondly,the rise of online shopping provides consumers with a new shopping experience and cultivates consumers’ new consumption habits of cross-channel free-riding between online websites and offline stores,namely consumers’ showroom behavior and webroom behavior.However,whether consumers’ cross-channel free-riding behavior will affect the effect of online retailers in facilitating product information disclosure has not been concluded.Therefore,it is of great significance for the healthy and rapid development of e-commerce industry to analyze whether or under what conditions online retailers of dual-channel retail market should take measures to facilitate the disclosure of online product information on the premise of considering consumers’ cross-channel free-riding behaviors.In order to answer the above questions,this paper analyzes the product information disclosure strategies of online retailers in three typical dual-channel retail market structures under the premise of considering two kinds of consumer’s cross-channel free-riding behaviors: The first study focuses on the optimal product information disclosure strategy of the online retailer in the dual-channel market structure,that is,in the dual-channel retail market composed of an online retailer and an offline retailer,under what conditions the online retailer should facilitate product information disclosure.The second study focuses on the dual-channel retail market after the emergence of e-commerce platforms.The online channel is composed of the cooperation between an online retail platform and a third-party seller,and the offline channel is the dual-channel retail market of an offline retailer.The optimal product information disclosure strategies of the e-commerce platform and the thirdparty seller under different online cooperation modes are analyzed.The third study focuses on the dual-channel market structure in recent years,that is,large online retailers have established their own brand offline stores while operating online stores.For dual-channel retailers with both online websites and offline stores,the third study studies the influence of different showroom strategies on their profits and analyzes their optimal showroom strategies.This paper uses game theory analysis method to describe consumers’ behavior of evaluating and purchasing products in online and offline channels from the perspective of consumers’ utility,focuses on the heterogeneity of consumers’ product matching attributes,abstracts key elements in the dual channel retail market combined with reality,describes the competition between online and offline channels,and establishes a game theory model.In this paper,the inverse method is used to solve the model,and the optimal product information disclosure strategy of online retailers in the dual-channel retail market with different structures is obtained without considering or considering the free-riding behaviors of consumers across channels.Finally,by comparing the conditions for online retailers to facilitate product information disclosure in these two scenarios,the influence of consumers’ cross-channel free-riding behaviors on the optimal product information disclosure strategy of online retailers is obtained.In this paper,the study of product information disclosure of retailers is introduced into the background of dual-channel retailing,and from the perspective of consumer utility,two kinds of consumer free-riding behaviors are analyzed.The existing researches on product matching information disclosure is mainly concentrated in the single channel retail scene;Many studies on consumers’ free-riding behaviors only focus on one kind of free-riding behavior,while most studies that analyze the two kinds of free-riding behaviors simultaneously assume the exogeneity of consumer behaviors,that is,assume the proportion of consumers who engage in a certain kind of free-riding behavior.Therefore,this study can enrich and supplement the fields related to product information disclosure,consumer freeriding behaviors and channel management in the context of e-commerce.This study also provides theoretical support for online retailers in different dual-channel market structures to develop product information disclosure strategies,and proposes that online retailers can use product information disclosure strategies to cope with the free-riding behaviors of consumers across channels,and online supply chain members can adjust the mode of cooperation to alleviate the inconsistent motivations of product information disclosure among members.The conclusion can provide management enlightenments for e-commerce enterprises to adapt to the new environment.