Advertising Strategies in Electronic Retailing: A Differential Games Approach
研究了双寡头电子零售商在信息技术容量约束下的广告问题，发现广告可能因处理延迟导致客户流失，通过微分博弈得到最优广告策略的解析解。
We consider advertising problems under an information technology (IT) capacity constraint encountered by electronic retailers in a duopolistic setting. There is a considerable amount of literature on advertising games between firms, yet introducing an IT capacity constraint fundamentally changes this problem. In the presence of information processing constraints, although advertising may still cause a customer to switch, it may not result in a sale, i.e., the customer may be lost by both firms. This situation could occur when customers have a limited tolerance for processing delays and leave the website of a firm because of slow response. In such situations, attracting more traffic to a firm's site (by increasing advertising expenditure) may not generate enough additional revenue to warrant this expenditure. We use a differential game formulation to obtain closed-form solutions for the advertising effort over time in the presence of IT capacity constraints. Based on these solutions, we present several useful managerial insights.