题　目：E-Tailing with Instant Return Credit

嘉　宾：石铎，助理教授，香港中文大学（深圳）

主持人：江浦平 助理教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时　间：2024年4月10日（周三）14:00-15:30pm

地　点：安泰楼A507室

内容简介：

Many e-tailers have recently adopted a new service---offering instant return credit (IRC) immediately upon an online return claim, without requiring the return to be received or verified. By improving consumers' temporary budgets, IRC helps resolve the mismatches between products and consumer tastes and thus converts online returns into new sales. This process is, however, prone to costly fake returns from dishonest consumers. In this paper, we take the initiative to study the fundamental dynamics and implications of IRC. We build a stylized economic model in which a retailer sells two horizontally differentiated products, facing consumers with heterogeneity in taste, budget level, and honesty type. We characterize product risk categories using three factors: product cost, consumer salvage value for a mismatched product, and proportion of dishonest consumers. Our results show that if consumer honesty type cannot be learned, uniform IRC (same to all consumers) should be adopted only for products with low or medium risk; paradoxically, while partial IRC should be offered for low-risk products, full IRC should be offered for medium-risk products. If consumer honesty type can be learned and contingent on, full (partial or no) IRC should be offered to honest (dishonest) consumers; the retailer may still allow fake returns even when consumer type can be perfectly learned. To cope with IRC, the retailer should prepare to switch to asymmetric pricing, although the two products are symmetric. Moreover, a higher product cost may result in a lower price. While uniform IRC is more valuable for low-risk products, making IRC contingent is more valuable for medium-risk products. Finally, uniform IRC may hurt both types of consumers for low-cost products, while making IRC contingent normally rewards honest consumers and penalizes dishonest consumers.

演讲人简介：

石铎，香港中文大学（深圳）经管学院助理教授。他于2018年取得圣路易斯华盛顿大学奥林商学院运营与制造业管理博士学位。此前，他毕业于中国科学技术大学华罗庚班。石铎用解析模型处理企业与政府部门的运营问题。他的近期研究囊括工业4.0下的运营策略、企业社会责任、农业与食品供应链以及内容运营等主题。石铎的研究成果发表于《Management Science》，《Manufacturing & Service Operations Management》,以及《Production and Operations Management》，他也同时担任这些期刊的审稿人。石铎主持国家自然科学基金青年项目，曾获颁多个学术会议最佳论文奖以及香港中文大学（深圳）校长杰出教学奖、经管学院科研奖。

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