中文摘要
本文考察了一种被广泛观察却在理论上探讨不足的销售策略:限时优惠。通过聚焦于价格导向的搜寻市场,我们为企业应用限时优惠及其社会福利影响提供了一个新视角。我们构建了一个企业通过宣传动态定价来影响消费者搜寻顺序的搜寻模型。在多种模型设定下,我们证明限时优惠是企业实现搜寻显著性或实施搜寻歧视的最有效定价工具,其对社会福利的影响因市场环境而异。特别地,尽管现有文献表明在搜寻前价格不可观察的市场中限时优惠具有反竞争性,我们的研究结果表明,在价格可观察的市场中,限时优惠在某些情形下能够通过促成社会最优的搜寻顺序而提高社会效率。
Abstract
This paper examines a widely observed yet theoretically underexplored sales tactic: the limited time offer. By focusing on price-directed search markets, we offer a novel perspective on the application of limited time offers by firms and their implications for social welfare. We build a search model where firms advertise dynamic pricing to influence a consumer’s search order. Across various model settings, we demonstrate that limited time offers serve as the most effective pricing tool for firms to achieve search prominence or implement search discrimination, with their impact on social welfare varying depending on the market context. In particular, although existing literature suggests that limited time offers are anticompetitive in markets where prices are unobservable presearch, our findings show that, in markets with observable prices, limited time offers can enhance social efficiency in certain cases by facilitating a socially optimal search order.