A Study On The Influence Of Channel Choice On Pricing Decisions Based On Multidimensional Heterogeneity Of Consumers

With the development of network technology and business model innovation,the group purchase regained a place in online sales.In the face of various types of group purchase and offline store transformation and upgrading,merchants have more choices in terms of sales channels.If merchants blindly carry out group buying without combining their own product characteristics and brand features with market research,it will easily lead to poor management and poor product services that do not meet consumer expectations,eventually leading to the loss of consumer confidence in the company or platform,and then eliminated from the market.Therefore,it is an important direction to study the effectiveness of group buying.With the rise of Pinduoduo,the research on social group buying has been extensive and mature.The simple advertising war,price war and tug-of-war in the group-buying market will inevitably lead to vicious competition in the industry,and a price war does not guarantee the healthy development of merchants.Therefore,the pricing behavior of merchants is crucial.Merchants seek to maximize revenue,and the literature has shown that consumer heterogeneity has a decisive role in merchants’ services and pricing.The factors that influence consumers’purchasing behavior directly affect market demand,which in turn affects merchants’revenue.This paper compares the traditional static pricing model of group purchase with the offline channel model,considers the heterogeneity of consumers,and uses probability theory,consumer surplus theory,optimization theory,and game theory to conduct research on the optimal pricing model and channel selection of merchants from both centralized and decentralized decision making perspectives.First,this paper innovatively introduces two factors,namely,differences in consumer channel preferences and differences in perceived product value,into the utility choice model and constructs a consumer market represented by a two-person group purchase size.Under the centralized decision,the optimal pricing model is constructed when the monopoly merchant buys in a group online or sells directly in an offline channel.The optimal pricing model and channel selection strategy under decentralized decision are investigated based on the sequential game model by combining the supply chain and considering the revenue of merchants and channel operators when the channel operators such as physical superstores/web platforms are dominant.The channel equilibrium results are obtained by comparing the returns under centralized and decentralized decision making.The results show that(1)the optimal pricing of merchants under both centralized and decentralized decisions is non-negatively related to consumer heterogeneity.(2)In terms of channel choice,the group-buying channel does not always achieve dominance.The group-buying equilibrium can be achieved when the degree of difference in perceived product value relative to the degree of difference in channel preference is large enough.That is,consumers’ merchants should consider the groupbuying model only when their positive utility for low prices and the positive utility from their perceptions of the product can compensate for lower offline channel preferences.(3)Centralized decision,whether offline preference or group purchase preference,merchants will choose lower product prices when the size of consumer channel heterogeneity and perceived value heterogeneity is relatively close;and merchants will set higher prices when one side is large enough compared to the other.(4)Under decentralized decision making,the pricing strategy of merchants is slightly different from that of centralized decision making due to the limitation of platform commission.If the degree of difference between consumer channel heterogeneity and product perceived value heterogeneity is close,the offline channel merchant needs to set a higher price than the best price in centralized decision making to achieve the maximum benefit due to the higher commission.In the group-buying channel,merchants implement low prices in both decentralized and centralized decision making.In this paper,we investigate the market conditions of channel selection and pricing under centralized and decentralized decision making,constructing a group-buying and offline market model based on both product heterogeneity and channel heterogeneity of consumers.In theory,on the one hand,this paper carries out the group-buying constraints of traditional static pricing mechanism group-buying,which enriches the research mechanism of group-buying market,and on the other hand,it considers the heterogeneity of two behavioral influencing factors of consumers,and puts its influence on demand quantity in spatial research,which enriches the research related to consumer heterogeneity.In practice,it is proposed that merchants should fully conduct market research and pay attention to consumer preference factors before carrying out group buying,which brings insights with wide significance to the operation mechanism of merchants.