Match Your Own Price? Self-Matching as a Retailer’s Multichannel Pricing Strategy
研究了多渠道零售商是否采用自我匹配政策（提供线上线下最低价）的战略决策，发现该策略在双头垄断中可通过抑制线上竞争和实现店内价格歧视来盈利，其效果取决于消费者决策阶段和渠道偏好异质性。
Multichannel retailing has created several new strategic choices for retailers. With respect to pricing, an important decision is whether to offer a “self-matching policy,” which allows a multichannel retailer to offer the lowest of its online and store prices to consumers. In practice, we observe considerable heterogeneity in self-matching policies: There are retailers who offer to self-match and retailers who explicitly state that they will not match prices across channels. Using a game-theoretic model, we investigate the strategic forces behind the adoption (or non-adoption) of self-matching across a range of competitive scenarios, including a monopolist, two competing multichannel retailers, as well as a mixed duopoly. Though self-matching can negatively impact a retailer when consumers pay the lower price, we uncover two novel mechanisms that can make self-matching profitable in a duopoly setting. Specifically, self-matching can dampen competition online and enable price discrimination in-store. Its effectiveness in these respects depends on the decision-making stage of consumers and the heterogeneity of their preference for the online versus store channels. Surprisingly, self-matching strategies can also be profitable when consumers use “smart” devices to discover online prices in stores. Our findings provide insights for managers on how and when self-matching can be an effective pricing strategy. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1035 .