دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی پیشرفت های تحقیقاتی اخیر در مورد رفتار مصرف کننده استراتژیک در مدیریت عملیات - الزویر 2018

Abstract

Strategic consumer behavior has been extensively studied in the Management Science and Operations Management community. We survey recent developments in the literature and review possible operational strategies and decisions to counteract the adverse impact of strategic consumer behavior. Specifically, we broadly characterize these decisions into three classes – Pricing, Inventory, and Information – and further discuss the influence of strategic consumer behavior on these decisions and their underlying mechanisms on counteracting consumers’ strategic waiting behavior.

6 Conclusion and Future Research

In this article, we review research papers that have recently emerged in the Management Science and Operations Management discipline and focus on the mechanisms and strategies to counteract the adverse influence of strategic consumer behavior. In particular, we categorize these mechanisms and strategies into three classes: Pricing, Inventory, and Information. In each of these three classes, the literature has been expanded extensively in the past decade, and an increasing number of innovative policies and strategies has been proposed to mitigate the adverse effect of strategic waiting behavior. We believe that modeling strategic consumer behavior will continue to be a fruitful research arena, as existing research has been repetitively affirming the importance of endogenizing such behavior in the firm’s decision-making process. Although we have seen a growing number of research papers that are devoted to this area, there are still many new directions worth further investigation.

In the big data era, individual-level data have been accumulated with extraordinary speed, and the growing availability of customer-specific data, including social media, demographics, geographic, browsing/shopping history, etc., provides both firms and consumers with unprecedented opportunities to tailor decisions to their own needs. One direct, and somewhat unfavorable, impact of this data is that it encourages strategic waiting behavior by equipping consumers with accurate historical pricing information. The immediate question is: How do consumers monitor price changes and/or predict future price trajectory? There are research papers that have started developing heuristics to model how strategic consumers make decisions based on available past pricing information (e.g., Wu et al. 2015). We believe it will be a promising and critical direction to understand this question, as to design better operational decisions, the firm must first understand the long-term impact of its pricing decisions. Besides pricing information, consumers receive, both actively and passively, information from their peers and social networks. Accordingly, how information spread among strategic consumers, how social networks change strategic consumers’ valuations and purchasing decisions, and accordingly how firms can influence these processes will be uncharted but interesting topics to explore.