초록
The proliferation of the Internet and related technologies has led to a new form of distribution channels, namely online retailers. The conventional offline and the new online retailers have different transaction costs perceived by the consumers in the following perspectives: the accessibility to the product information, the traffic cost and the opportunity cost for the time to visit the store, the delivery time and the possibility of 'touch and feel' to test the quality of the product. In particular, the online retailers have lower distribution cost structure in that they do not have physical stores, which results in lower selling price. Thus they continuously offer price competition against offline retailers using the lower selling cost as competitive weapon. Moreover the emergence of the social commerce is likely to intensify the competition between the online and offline retailers. To survive in this fierce competition, the offline retailers are trying to defend their business interests by sticking to offline transaction in anticipation of increased customer loyalty, customer's preference for 'touch and feel' style shopping, and others. Despite of these efforts, customers who touch and feel a product in an offline store but purchase the product through an online retailer are increasing. To protect such customers, recently, some of the offline retailers began to provide the mobile discount service (MDS) which enables the offline customers to purchase a product at a discounted price through the mobile applications. In business competitions, the price discount strategy is usually considered to secure more market share at the cost of lower profit. In this study, however, we analyze the effect of MDS as a weapon for securing more profit. To do this, we set up a game model between the online and offline retailers which incorporates the effect of the MDS. By numerically analyzing the Nash equilibrium of the game, some managerial implications for using the MDS for more profit are discussed.
