Research On Information Disclosure Strategy Of Offline And Online Retailers Under Different Competitive Structure

Technological innovation brought by the rapid development of science and technology and the enterprises' constant mining of demand for consumption have brought about a constant upgrading of the consumer market.Especially in the fields of automobile.electronic products and household appliances.New products,new ways of use and new functions are constantly emerging.Information decision is also a key factor affecting consumer purchasing behavior for enterprise facing information asymmetry,besides the products and pricing decisions.Based on heterogeneous consumer market with asymmetric information,this paper studies the information disclosure strategy of dual-channel retailers under different competitive structure.First of all,considering the asymmetry of quality information,the problem of information disclosure decision for a monopoly retailer selling products with vertical differentiation through online and offline is discussed based on Hotelling model,facing consumers with different preferences to each channel.The strategy of quality information disclosure of retailers is determined by solving the dynamic game of incomplete information.It is found that the optimal disclosure strategy is mainly affected by product quality positioning and disclosure cost.In addition,the increase of both the retailer's service level offline and consumer's unit matching cost online leads to less information disclosed from the online channel and more information disclosed from the offline channel.Secondly,with the asymmetry of both quality information and preference information,the competitive online and offline retailers' information disclosure decision facing the consumer with heterogeneous preferences for quality is considered.The utility competition model under different disclosure strategy combinations is established to solve the Nash equilibrium of the disclosure strategy for a online retailer and a offline retailer under quality symmetry and quality asymmetry,respectively.The results show that when the quality of different channels is symmetric,the Nash equilibrium of the disclosure strategy always be obtained.There are two groups of Nash equilibrium at the same time.That is,when the cost of disclosure is high,there are two strategic equilibria of "only online disclosure" and "both offline and online disclosure".And when the cost of disclosure is low,there are two strategic equilibria of "only online disclosure" and "only offline disclosure".Considering the asymmetry of quality,at least one of the two channels is willing to disclose information;when the marginal cost anddisclosure cost are low,both retailers choose to disclose information.The equilibrium of "only online disclosure" still exists,in which offline product will be considered as a party of lower quality.Even there is no cost to disclose for online channel,the equilibrium of "only offline disclosure" still exists.With the change of consumption environment,so the decision of information disclosure should be introduced into the multi-channel environment.This results above not only enrich the theoretical research of information disclosure,but also have some practical significance to guide online and offline retailers to make information disclosure strategies and product positioning decisions.