Showrooming, webrooming, and operational strategies for competitiveness
研究消费者在实体店和网店之间比价购买（展厅/网络展厅现象）的原因，发现信息和非信息因素驱动，并提出了实体店店内研究协助和网店免费样品等运营策略来提升零售商竞争力。
Show/webrooming refers to a consumer inspecting a product at a brick‐and‐mortar (BM)/online retailer before purchasing it from a competing online/BM retailer. Despite retailers adopting price‐matching and free‐shipping policies, show/webrooming remains prevalent. We model different product value information that consumers can learn by visiting a BM retailer and researching an online retailer, and studying consumers' show/webrooming behavior in a unified model. We confirm that consumers can engage in show/webrooming for informational reasons, but webrooming may also be driven by a noninformational reason. We find that show/webrooming may, respectively, benefit BM and online retailers; in particular, there exist win‐win‐win outcomes where both retailers and the consumers benefit from show/webrooming. We propose in‐store research assistance for BM retailers and free sampling for online retailers and show that these operational strategies may improve the retailers' competitiveness in the presence of show/webrooming. Our results are found to be robust in several model extensions.