Relationship Organization and Price Delegation: An Experimental Study
通过实验室实验研究价格授权给销售团队对经理利润的影响，发现经理经常选择授权且销售人员以互惠行为回应，从而提升利润，且允许请求和奖金时效果更明显。
Price delegation to the salesforce is a practice widely adopted by firms. This paper examines the relationship between price delegation and managerial profits using a laboratory economics experiment. A novel feature of our experiment is that we study how varying the relationship organization of the sales manager and salesperson to allow for (1) requests by the salesperson for the manager to choose price delegation, and for (2) the manager to award a small bonus after observing the salesperson's decisions, can affect behavior. The results show that, contrary to the theoretical prediction, managers choose price delegation frequently and salespeople respond reciprocally, leading to higher manager profits under price delegation. Moreover, this behavior increases when requests and bonuses are allowed. We show that a behavioral economics model that incorporates positive reciprocity can explain these results well. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1778 . This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.