Exploratory Study Of Consumers’Cross-Channel Free-Riding Behavior Under Dual Channel Environment

With the development of e-commerce, retailers’sales channels will shift from the traditional single-channel distribution to multi-channel systems. In multi-channel environment, consumers can move easily among different channels. This article will regard intelligent consumers under dual channel environment of B2C as the object of study, it focuses on the problem is that consumers search for information from offline channel and switch to online channel to purchase products. This thesis analyzes consumers’purchase decisions, retailers’price game and sales service by constructing a three phases game model involves two retailers in different channels and consumers. Expressions for two retailers’optimal prices, profits in equilibrium and related propositions are derived and discussed. The results show that four types of consumers choose different channels at information searching stage and purchase decision-making stage of the purchase decision process, which ease the price competition between retailers to some extent.Consumers can use one offline retailer’s channel to obtain information or evaluate products and then switch to another online retailer’s channel to complete the purchase. Furthermore, this article will explore several factors that may lead consumers to switch between channels during their purchase process. The push effect, which consists of consumers’perceived self-efficacy to employ multiple channels, has a positive influence on cross-channel free-riding intentions. The pull effect, or the relative attractiveness of the competitors’online retail stores, also has a positive influence on these intentions. However, the mooring effect, or within-firm lock-in, has a negative influence on cross-channel free-riding intentions.The studies above based on the actual problem, on the one hand, analyzing the formation mechanism of cross-channel free-riding Behavior in the market in phases from the perspective of game theory; on the other hand, analyzing the driving factors of cross-channel free-riding behavior based on the PPM model. These efforts provide theoretical guidance for retailers in real life to develop reasonable and effective consumer retention strategies to a certain extent, at the same time, it enriches academic subjects of the channels research fields in the supply chain.