Buyer-Initiated vs. Seller-Initiated Information Revelation
比较了卖方主导和买方主导两种信息揭示方式对销售、产品质量和企业利润的影响,发现买方主导方式能提高成交率和产品质量,并在竞争市场中带来正利润。
Sales presentations are the core of the selling process where salespeople provide information to prospects. One challenge is that the amount of information available to be potentially communicated may exceed salespeople's ability to communicate or customers' ability to process: there is limited “bandwidth” between the firm and customers. One important decision, then, is which information should customers see? What the firm chooses to tell customers may be informative in itself. When constrained to a “seller-initiated information revelation” format, where the firm chooses which feature to show, the firm never finds it optimal to offer more features than it is able to inform customers about. Consequently, customers never find credible a claim that the product has all features. The important implication is that price alone cannot serve as a signal of quality in this setting. In contrast, a “buyer-initiated information revelation” format, where customers decide which information to receive, increases the probability of a sale and also results in the production of higher quality products. In a competitive setting, by adopting buyer-initiated information revelation, firms are able to attain positive profits. This is due to the fact that customers infer the product's quality from the price along with the information revelation format. Customers know that at some prices, firms find it profitable to produce high-quality products and at other, lower, prices, this is not the case. Thus, customer empowerment leads to higher profits.