题　目：Product bundling and inequity aversion

嘉　宾：Sandun Perera, Associate Professor, University of Nevada, Reno

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12月30日（周一）10:00-11:30

地　点：安泰楼A511室

内容简介：

Consumers perceive prices as unfair when a firm's profit margin is disproportionately high relative to the consumer surplus. When purchasing products at unfair prices, the inequity-averse consumers incur psychological disutility. This paper studies the impact of consumer inequity aversion on a firm's optimal product bundling and pricing strategy, as well as its implications for consumer surplus and social welfare. Our analysis yields several interesting findings. First, although the extant bundling literature posits that bundling high-cost products would be detrimental to a firm, we show this does not necessarily hold when consumers exhibit a fairly high degree of inequity aversion. Thus, our study reveals a new rationale for bundling in enabling a high-cost firm to mitigate consumers' perceptions of price unfairness and increase their willingness to pay. Second, while intuition suggests that a firm should lower the price with the increase of consumer inequity aversion, our results reveal that the contrary might happen, for a firm serving heterogeneous market segments. Third, in contrast to the popular viewpoint, in both industry and academia, that bundling enables a firm to effectively extract surpluses at the expense of consumers, we find that the use of bundling can improve inequity-averse consumers' welfare. Our findings therefore caution the regulators that the potential legislative bans against bundling in the various industries might not be advisable. Further, we examine the implications of cost disclosure and find that cost disclosure decisions by a firm and a social planner often align and can improve both the firm's profit and social welfare. In scenarios where cost disclosure increases social welfare at the expense of a firm, our findings suggest that a policymaker could mandate the firm to disclose the cost.

演讲人简介：

Sandun Perera is an Associate Professor of Business Analytics and Operations in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his Ph.D. in Operations Management as well as an MBA and an M.S. in Supply Chain Management from the Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. He also holds a Ph.D. in Financial Mathematics, and Master of Science degrees in Statistics and Applied Mathematics, and in Mathematics from Florida Atlantic University. He earned his B.S. in Finance, Business, and Computational Mathematics with first-class honors from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. His research broadly focuses on Supply Chain Management, Disruptive Technologies in Operations Management, Healthcare Operations Management, and interfaces between Operations and other functional areas in business. Sandun has worked collaboratively with multinational technology companies, retailers, hospitals, blood banks, and pharmaceutical companies for his research and his work has appeared in numerous journals including Financial Times’ Top 50 Journals: https://www.sandunperera.com/research.html. He currently serves as a senior editor for the Production and Operations Management Journal and an associate editor for Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review. He is also a board member of the Production and Operations Management Society.

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