题目：Search Prominence in a Distribution Channel（分销渠道中的搜索显示度）
时间：2025年5月29日 10:00-11:30
地点：后主楼1722
主讲人：朱 毅 教授（明尼苏达大学）
主持人：龚诗阳 教授（北京师范大学）
期刊面对面活动
时间：2025年5月29日 14:00-15:30
地点：后主楼1722
主讲人：朱 毅 教授（明尼苏达大学）
主持人：唐红红 副教授（北京师范大学）
摘要：
Consumers increasingly start online price searches from a prominent retailer compared to any other retailer, raising questions about the impact of such prominence on channel members and consumers. This study examines a search model that incorporates channel structure, where consumers search sequentially across prominent and non-prominent retailers, and retailer pricing is jointly influenced by consumers’ reservation price and the manufacturer’s wholesale price. The analysis demonstrates contrasting effects of search prominence across different channel structures. Within a channel with duopoly retailers, prominence mitigates price competition, raising retail prices. In terms of profit, the manufacturer is disadvantaged, while the prominent retailer benefits, and the non-prominent retailer gains only when the proportion of costly search consumers is low. Conversely, in an oligopoly, prominence intensifies price competition, forcing non-prominent retailers to price at the wholesale level, which supports a higher wholesale price. Non-prominent retailers are consistently worse off, while prominence can result in either win-win, lose-win, or lose-lose outcomes for the manufacturer and the prominent retailer. Finally, although search prominence intensifies price competition in an oligopoly, it leads to lower consumer surplus while not necessarily reducing channel profit or social surplus. We conclude by discussing potential policy remedies and managerial implications of search prominence.
演讲嘉宾简介：
Yi Zhu is Professor of Marketing, and Margaret J. Holden and Dorothy A. Werlich Endowed Professor at the University of Minnesota. He received a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Southern California in 2013. He worked as a consultant at Shanghai Investment Consulting Corporation before he went to Vancouver, where he received an MA in Economics from University of British Columbia. His research interests focus on the application of industrial organization models in marketing, online auctions, consumer search, advertising, media slant, sharing economy and Chinese economy. His works have appeared or forthcoming at Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Production and Operations Management, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. Beyond academic publications, his research has been discussed in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, CBS, Entrepreneur, Star Tribune, Toronto Star, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Global News Radio among others.
Zhu's research has won a series of best-paper awards, including the John D.C. Little Award for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science, the Don Morrison Long Term Impact Award for making a significant long run impact on the field of marketing, the Shankar-Spiegel Best Dissertation Proposal Award, and the finalist for the Frank M. Bass Award for the best marketing paper derived from a PhD thesis published in INFORMS journals. He has been selected as a 2017 Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Young Scholars, a biennial award given to the most promising scholars in marketing who have distinguished themselves as potential leaders of the next generation of marketing academics, and the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Scholars in 2022, a title awarded to “top scholars helping to set the research agenda for the field.” In 2022, he was awarded the Carlson School Outstanding Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching. Zhu currently serves as an Associate Editor for Marketing Science and is a member of the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of Marketing Research.