考虑在线评论的产品免费试用策略

商家提供产品免费试用,要求试用者对产品质量进行在线评论,消费者基于在线评论进行购买决策。免费试用者数量越多,在线评论数量越多,消费者对在线评论越信任。考虑在线评论和产品生产成本,研究商家的产品免费试用策略及其对利润的影响。研究发现,虽然商家承受免费试用的产品生产成本损失,但是免费试用产生的在线评论可以使商家更好地按照产品质量制定价格,因此当产品生产成本较低时,提供免费试用可以提高商家利润。产品生产成本提高,商家的最优免费试用数量减少。产品质量不确定性越大或失配距离单位成本越低,免费试用给商家带来的收益越高。

On Free Trials with Online Consumer Reviews

An online seller provides free trial products, on the condition that the free users should make online reviews about the product quality. The regular consumers make purchasing decisions based on the online reviews. The more the free users, the greater number of the online reviews, and the regular consumers rely more on the online reviews. Considering both the online reviews and the unit production cost of the free trial product, this paper studies the online seller’s free trial provision strategy, and its impacts on the online seller’s profit. We show that although the online seller incurs loss of production by offering free trials, the online reviews induced by the free trials enable the seller to set a price responsive to the product quality, and hence the seller benefits from offering free trials when the unit production cost is low. The optimal number of free trial products decreases with the unit production cost. With higher uncertainty on the product quality or lower unit mismatching cost, the revenue brought by offering free trials becomes higher.