The Effects Of Mental Accounting And The Undisclosed Regular Price In A Presale Mechanism

The rapid development of Internet technology and e-commerce has led to a variety of product sales.In order to be able to more quickly understand consumer demand information,merchants began to widely use pre-sales methods to sell goods,and presales were promoted to specific products such as houses,airline tickets,and opera tickets.Pre-sale refers to a sales strategy that merchants begin to accept customer orders before new products are listed.Presale allows manufacturers and retailers to obtain production and subscription funds in advance,accelerate cash flow,and reduce inventory costs and risks.Usually the pre-sale will be accompanied by certain promotional activities,such as lower price discounts,deposits,doubling expenses,coupons,gifts,etc.,but it also requires consumers to pay a part of the price of the goods in advance as a deposit,involving advance payment.There is a certain degree of risk in advance payment,which is affected by consumers' mental accounts and the discount of time value of goods.Therefore,each consumer's response to advance payment is different.Prospect theory well explains why some consumers are willing to participate in pre-sale while some consumers are willing to spend more money to purchase goods during the spot sale period.Consumers' decision-making comes from the comparison of gains from purchasing,the comparison of the proceeds from the purchase of goods or not,the comparison of the proceeds from participation in pre-sales or not participating in pre-sales.Faced with increasingly rational and strategic consumers,it is particularly important for businesses to formulate reasonable pre-sale strategies.Therefore,based on the research results of consumer psychological accounts in the existing behavioral economics and the different effects of psychological account factors on consumer purchasing behavior in the process of advance payment,this article divides consumers into two categories,one class of consumers is strongly influenced by psychological account factors,and one class of consumers is less affected by psychological account factors.At the same time,it introduces a time price discount factor that the consumers can not get the goods immediately at the pre-sale stage.When merchants use presales to sell goods,they compare the gains that consumers receive in the pre-sale phase with the gains that consumers receive when they purchase goods in the spot sales phase,and ultimately arrive at the consumer's purchase decision.The difference between the valuation of a commodity by a consumer when purchasing a commodity is due,on the one hand,to the perception of the consumer's psychology,and on the one hand to the asymmetry of the commodity information between the merchant and the consumer.This article separately constructs and solves the mathematical model under the two conditions of the market price of the open and undisclosed commodity spot sales stage at the pre-sale stage,and obtains the merchant's optimal price discount and the maximum expected return.Finally,a numerical example is provided to compare and analyze the expected benefits obtained by the merchants in these two situations,and to provide a basis for the formulation of merchant pre-sale strategies.The findings are as follows:(1)The greater the consumer's pain-weakening coefficient,the greater the degree to which the psychological pain of consumers is weakened;(2)Adopting the same sales strategy,the benefits of low-cost products are often higher than high costs;(3)The price discounts and profits earned by merchants in the pre-sale phase are inversely proportional to the rate of decay of consumers' valuation of goods over time;(4)The merchants can gain more when taking a non-public strategy than the public strategy,but the optimal pre-sale price discount is often lower than the public strategy;(5)When the spot price is not disclosed,when the number of consumers who not affected by the painful weakening coefficient is increasing,the merchant is not suitable to adopt the pre-sale sales strategy;when the spot price is disclosed,the pre-sale price discount of the merchant is often higher,and at this time the merchants' optimal pre-sale price discount is independent of the proportion of consumers that are not affected by the psychological account factor.This paper applies the theory of psychological accounts and prospects and many proven behavioral economics theories to different pre-sale models,to a certain extent,it makes up for the inadequacy of the introduction of behavioral economics assumptions in existing presales models,the choices of consumers in the face of merchant sales activities are closer to reality.At the same time,it also provides a strong basis for businesses to better understand the purchase behavior of rational consumers,help businesses to select the appropriate presale strategies and pricing mechanisms,reduce the ordering costs and inventory costs of businesses,and encourage businesses to obtain greater profits.