The Pricing Decision and Channel Choice of Upgraded Products in the Presence of Strategic Consumers

Many dual-channel suppliers need to make appropriate strategies for their upgraded products in the presence of strategic consumers. This paper develops a two-period dynamic game framework to explore the optimal pricing and upgrade the channel choice when the supplier introduces new upgraded products to a market populated by strategic consumers. The results show that, under any upgrade channel choice, the strategic consumers' behavior has impacts on supplier and retailer's pricing decisions and reduces their profit. The supplier could choose appropriate upgrade channel to improve his performance according to the consumers' patience and innovation level of upgrade products. The supplier should choose pure offline channel to upgrade products when the innovation level of upgraded product B is relatively small. With the sufficiently high innovation level, the supplier should adopt pure offline channel to upgrade products when consumers' patience is low and uses dual-channel upgrade strategy when the patience is high enough.