喻园管理论坛2024年第72期(总第1004期)

演讲主题: Vertical Competition with Common Attributes

主  讲 人:陈蓉（Rachel Chen），加州大学戴维斯分校管理学院教授

主  持 人:邓世名 供应链管理与系统工程系教授

活动时间: 2024年7月9日（周二）10：00—11：30

活动地点:管院大楼119室

主讲人简介：

陈蓉（Rachel Chen），加州大学戴维斯分校管理学院的教授。本科毕业于同济大学计算机科学专业，硕士毕业于复旦大学管理信息系统专业，于2002年获得康奈尔大学运营管理专业博士学位。Rachel Chen博士主要从事运营研究、供应链管理，服务运营和动态定价领域的研究，目前的研究重点是新技术市场的定价、供应链和服务运营中的电子采购和分销。她目前有多篇论文发表在国际顶级期刊如IIE Transactions, Management Science, Marketing Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research Letters,和Production and Operations Management上。她目前是Decision Science和IIE Transactions的associate editor和Production and Operations Management的senior editor.

活动简介：

Vertically differentiated products in a competitive market often share common attributes (e.g., location value, infrastructure, or technologies) provided by third-parties. In this study, we characterize how common attributes affect high- and low-quality firms in their offerings of individual attributes and pricing, and consequently affect market competition and social welfare. First, we disentangle three distinctive effects of common attributes on vertical competition, and identify a“bottom-up”influence through which common attributes affect the low-quality firm greater than the high-quality firm. Second, we show that more desirable common attributes have different implications for vertical competition in different product markets. For information goods, the high-quality firm improves individual attributes in response to more desirable common attributes, but the low-quality firm reduces individual attributes. For industrial goods, both firms mostly reduce individual attributes. In equilibrium, more desirable common attributes weaken the dominance of the high-quality firm for information goods, whereas the weakening effect is negligible for industrial goods. For both product types, a major portion of the benefit from desirable common attributes is passed through to end consumers. Finally, we examine a retail platform's commission policy when its infrastructure constitutes common attributes for vertically differentiated vendors, and identify a ``top-down'' influence through which the commission policy affects the high-quality firm greater than the low-quality firm in moderating the impact of common attributes. We show that more advanced infrastructure motivates the platform to implement a higher commission, which leads both firms to offer inferior individual attributes.