Perishable Product Intertemporal Pricing With Strategic Customer Behavior

As one of the most commonly used and important pricing strategies in current marketing,intertemporal pricing strategy plays an important role in improving the income of merchants.It can be used in almost all kinds of product sales,especially in the pricing of perishable products.In essence,intertemporal pricing is a kind of price discrimination.It divides consumers into different parts by taking advantage of the factor that consumers buy products at different times.By charging different prices to consumers in different sales periods,it can extract as much surplus from consumers as possible and thus achieve the purpose of increasing income.The intertemporal pricing and order quantity problems of retailers are studied when there is strategic buying behavior in the market,and the influence of consumer strategy behavior on retailers’ optimal pricing decision and corresponding revenue is also studied in different situations.Firstly,the intertemporal pricing and order quantity of perishable goods in the market with multiple consumer types are studied.By using the optimization theory and the backward induction method of dynamic game,the optimal purchasing decision of consumers and the optimal pricing and ordering decision of retailers are obtained.The study shows that the waiting for purchase behavior is unfavorable to the retailer,and the existence of strategic consumers reduces the retailer’s profit,and the higher the proportion of strategic consumers,the more obvious the adverse effect.In order to mitigate this adverse effect,the retailer will lower the price of the first stage and raise the price of the second stage,reducing the price reduction to entice strategic consumers to buy the product sooner.The author also finds that the higher the proportion of strategic consumers,the lower the retailer’s order quantity,the first-stage pricing and the price reduction,but the higher the second-stage pricing.Then,in the market competition environment,the author studies the competitive intertemporal pricing and order quantity of two competing sellers who each sells a single product separately,and the individual product sold by each seller can substitute for each other.By analyzing the purchase conditions of the two products,the purchasing decisions of consumers with different valuations under different circumstances are obtained.Based on consumers’ purchase decisions,the two-stage revenue function of each retailer is established,and the profit maximization model of each retailer is established.By backward induction method,the optimal intertemporal pricing,optimal order quantity and corresponding profit of the two competing retailers under different circumstances are obtained.Finally,the author analysis the shortcomings in the research process and the possible expansion of the future research.The research in this paper can be a good guide to the pricing of various perishable products.In particular,the application of this research results in agricultural product sales,rural tourism,rural accommodation and catering industries can well increase farmers’ income,help solve the problems of agriculture,rural areas and rural revitalization.