Retailer’s Pricing And Quick Response Research Based On Strategic Customer Behavior

With the increasingly fierce competition in the market and the rapid development ofscience and technology, the updating speed of product becomes faster and faster, and moreand more products have the characteristic of perishability. Faced with the complex andvolatile market environment and the increasingly personalized customer needs, the retaileroften has difficulty in ordering accurate quantity of the product. If the retailer orders toomany products which exceed the demand of customers, the retailer has to deal with the restof inventory through price-off promotions at the end of selling season. With increasingpromotion frequency and strengthening promotion efforts at the end of selling season, moreand more customers find that it is more profitable for them to wait for price-off promotions.When customers go shopping, they will make the best choice between buying immediatelyand waiting to purchase discount products. This kind of behavior that customers comparedifferent options to maximize their utility is known as strategic customer behavior. In recentyears, the research of customer strategic behavior has made considerable progress. Thispaper does some research on strategic customer behavior; the main work of this paper is asfollows: This paper builds upon the classic newsvendor inventory model, so the classicnewsvendor inventory model is introduced briefly. Strategic customer behavior is introducedinto the classic continuous newsvendor inventory model, which extends the classicnewsvendor inventory model from the perspective of a customer; then based on strategiccustomer behavior, most favored consumer contract and price guarantees are introduced intothe classic continuous newsvendor inventory model, which extends the classic newsvendorinventory model from the perspective of a retailer. Classic newsvendor model and twoexpansion models lay a foundation for the following chapters. A newsvendor model is built,which is composed of a retailer and a customer group consisting of both strategic customersand myopic customers. The price guarantee mechanism is introduced so that it is possiblefor the retailer to unify price towards the strategic customers and myopic customers.Research results revealed: when carrying out the price guarantee mechanism in thenewsvendor model, the retailer can make a uniform price for the product withoutconsidering the proportion of the strategic customers and myopic customers. Moreover,compared with pricing only based on the reservation price of the strategic customers ormyopic customers, the retailer can get more profits with price guarantee mechanism. At theend of selling season, the retailer always deals with the rest of inventory through price-offpromotions, which reduce customers’ willingness to buy at the selling season. Customershave largely been trained to wait for sales, which affects the retailer’s profit. In reality, a retailer often carries out many kinds of strategies to induce customers to buy early. Giftpromotion can promote the valuations of strategy customers of the products and enhancecustomers’ willingness to buy, so that strategy customers want to get the products at theselling season. Quick response can make a retailer cope with an uncertain market demandbetter. Quick response not only can reduce profit loss caused by products out of stock, butalso can make customers purchase in advance by restricting the availability of the product,which can efficiency improve retailer’s profits. Compared with carrying out either strategy,the retailer can gain more profit if he carries out gift promotion strategy and quick responsestrategy at the same time.