How Service Quality Variability Hurts Revenue When Customers Learn: Implications for Dynamic Personalized Pricing
研究发现，当客户通过体验学习服务质量时，质量波动会导致客户因糟糕体验而降低购买意愿，但动态定价可缓解这一影响，甚至完全消除波动带来的收入损失。
Most service settings involve some degree of variability in the quality of customers’ experiences. An understudied mechanism is analyzed by which this variability can reduce firm revenues when customers do not know true service quality but rather learn about that quality over time based on their experiences. Essentially, customers get stuck with low-quality opinions and low purchase likelihoods after unusually bad experiences. However, high-quality opinions after unusually good experiences are quickly corrected. The authors show that dynamic pricing can help mitigate this effect. Specifically, if the firm can set individual prices so that each customer perceives the same surplus, then the variability impact is entirely eliminated. They also demonstrate that simpler heuristics similar to those observed in practice (requiring less information and pricing flexibility) can partially mitigate the revenue loss.