پیشرفت های تحقیقاتی اخیر در مورد رفتار مصرف کننده استراتژیک در مدیریت عملیات Recent Research Developments of Strategic Consumer Behavior in Operations Management

1 Introduction Technological advances have accelerated the adoption of dynamic pricing practice in industries such as retail, airline, and hotel, and trained consumers to time their purchases strategically for anticipated future discounts. Strategic consumer behavior has been an extensively discussed topic in the literature since Coase (1972), who argues that a monopolist’s profit will be negatively influenced if consumers, anticipating future price drops, postpone their purchases – the idea of strategic consumer behavior. Since then, strategic consumer behavior has been empirically observed and studied for various industries such as console video games (Nair 2007), textbooks (Chevalier and Goolsbee 2009), soft drinks (Hendel and Nevo 2013), and airline tickets (Li et al. 2014). In a controlled laboratory environment, Osadchiy and Bendoly (2015) find that facing a future purchase opportunity, up to 79% of customers exhibit strategic behavior. Furthermore, as strategic consumers will prefer to buy later at discounted prices instead of paying premium prices up-front, the literature overwhelmingly demonstrates that firms will significantly suffer from strategic consumer behavior. It is noteworthy, however, that being strategic may not necessarily benefit consumers. For example, Aflaki et al. (2016) demonstrate that depending on their valuations, many consumers will have lower surplus if they choose to behave strategically than if they are myopic. The negative impact of strategic consumer behavior on the seller’s profitability has been ubiquitously documented in the literature. For example, Coase (1972) argues that the monopolist cannot effectively exercise price discrimination on durable goods, because if the consumers rationally anticipate a price drop in the future, they will postpone their purchases. Following this logic, Coase (1972) conjectures that the only price at which the monopolist can expect to sell its products is the clearance price. This means that strategic consumer behavior results not only in the lack of ability to exercise discrimination, but the monopolist completely loses market power in the sense that it cannot even charge the best fixed price. Similar observations that the seller’s ability to adjust future prices can be exploited by consumers, who wait strategically for future discounts to avoid paying the premium price up-front, have been extensively reported in the literature (e.g., Besanko and Winston 1990, Elmaghraby et al. 2008, Stokey 1979, and Su 2007). Therefore, explicitly integrating strategic consumer behavior into the seller’s decision-making processes is vital to the firm’s profit performance, as ignoring strategic consumer behavior by incorrectly assuming that strategic customers are myopic can be quite costly – reaching a potential revenue loss of about 20% (Aviv and Pazgal 2008). Hence, identifying tactics and strategies to counteract the adverse impact of strategic consumer behavior becomes a central research question in the strategic consumer behavior literature and will also be the focus of this review paper.