A Salesforce-Driven Model of Consumer Choice
研究了销售人员如何影响消费者选择，以及企业如何根据产品吸引力、替代性和利润率设定最优佣金，并比较了销售激励与价格折扣的效果。
This paper studies how salespeople affect the choices of which products consumers choose, and from that, how a firm should set optimal commissions as a function of the appeal, substitutability, and profit margins of different products. We also examine whether firms are better off promoting products through sales incentives or price discounts. To achieve these goals, we develop a salesforce-driven consumer choice model to study how performance-based commissions incentivize a salesperson’s service effort toward heterogeneous, substitutable products carried by a firm. The model treats the selling process as a joint decision by the salesperson and the consumer. It allows the salesperson’s efforts to vary across different transactions, depending on the unique preferences of each consumer, and incorporates the effects of commissions and other marketing mix elements on the selling outcome in a unified framework. We estimate the model using data from a car dealership. We find that the optimal commissions should be lower for popular items and for items that are closer substitutes with other products. We also find that for the car industry we study, the cost of selling more cars using sales incentives is cheaper than the cost of selling the same number of cars using price discounts.