Do Coupons Expand or Cannibalize Revenue? Evidence from an e-Market
研究优惠券能否通过吸引新顾客来扩大收入而不蚕食现有顾客收入，发现优惠券在促销期间及之后均能提升需求，但效果因企业特征而异。
Coupons have been a mainstay of marketing for decades all over the world, but their short- and long-run effects on sales are still not understood fully. We develop a model of consumer demand to empirically study whether firms can indeed use coupons as a means to price discriminate by attracting new consumers without losing (cannibalizing) revenue from existing ones, and whether these new consumers return to the firm after the price promotion. In addition, we ask what types of businesses are most likely to benefit from such promotions. Following alcohol revenue for restaurants using e-coupons, we find that offering a coupon increases demand during the promotion, and to a lesser degree after the promotion, suggesting that coupons can be used to price discriminate, while an advertising effect is less obvious. While coupons increase profits on average, the effect on each firm’s profits depends on the firm’s characteristics. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2934 . This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.