Abstract: Advance selling is increasingly adopted by online retailers to encourage consumers' early purchases.Since consumers in online markets have high valuation uncertainty about product quality, online consumer reviews have become an important factor that affectstheir purchasing decisions and thus has impacts on online retailers' advance selling strategies. This study aims to examine online retailers' optimal advance selling strategies by incorporating the effects of online consumer reviews.To address such challenging question, a theoretical model is developed and it is considered that an online retailer sells a new product to the market over two periods (i.e., the advance period and the regular period). Consumers in the market are composed of two types:the loyal consumers and the common consumers. Online reviews generated by loyal consumers in the advance period will affect the purchasing decisions of common consumers in the regular period. To further examine the impacts of online consumer reviews on the effectiveness of advance selling, two market scenarios are considered:the monopoly market and the competitive market. Through theoretical analysis, it is found that, in both monopoly and competitive markets, if loyal consumers choose to wait until the regular period to buy products, it is beneficial for the online retailer to provide a discounted advance selling price to enhance consumer reviews, and thus lead more consumers to buy in the regular period. It is noteworthy that in the competitive market, if the preference cost of common consumers is very low and the purchasing proportion of loyal consumers in the advance period is small, advance selling at a discount can prevent competitors to enter the market by enhancing online reviews. With the increase of common consumers' preference cost, it is beneficial for the online retailer to focus on loyal consumers, which can mitigate the competition between the online retailer and its competitor.This study enriches extant literature on advance selling by incorporating the effects of online consumer reviews, and the obtained results can provide practical managers with some valuable suggestions.

Key words: e-commerce, online consumer reviews, advance selling, pricing, competition