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Chinese Journal of Management Science ›› 2025, Vol. 33 ›› Issue (12): 253-263.doi: 10.16381/j.cnki.issn1003-207x.2023.0375

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Dynamic Pricing with Consumer Loss Aversion and Online Reviews

Xiao Wang1,2, Chaolin Yang1()   

  1. 1.Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences,Shanghai University of Finance and Economics,Shanghai 200433,China
    2.School of Business and Trade,Nanjing Vocational University of Industry Technology,Nanjing 210023,China
  • Received:2023-03-07 Revised:2023-08-14 Online:2025-12-25 Published:2025-12-25
  • Contact: Chaolin Yang E-mail:yang.chaolin@sufe.edu.cn

Abstract:

Consumers are generally loss averse and are often reluctant to purchase emerging goods of uncertain quality. Before purchasing a good, consumers may browse the rating information displayed on the review platform to form a clearer perception of the quality of the good, mitigating the impact of loss aversion. Then, after purchase and use, consumers may return to the review platform to give their ratings. A multi-stage dynamic pricing model is constructed for a monopoly firm under the online review scenario that considers consumers' loss aversion. The firm maximizes its revenue by dynamically adjusting its price to balance earning higher current revenue and accumulating rating information more quickly. Due to the complex inter-period impacts of pricing and the stochastic and non-linear properties of the evolution process of the state variables, the exact optimal strategy for the problem is difficult to find. Therefore, a deterministic treatment based on the fluid approximation method is carried out, from which a pricing strategy with asymptotic optimality is found. Furthermore, the impact of consumer loss aversion on pricing is discussed. Finally, the effectiveness of the policy is verified through numerical experiments based on real data from Amazon. The experimental results find that the dynamic price strategy can enhance revenue by about 10% compared to the fixed price strategy. On the basis of the dynamic price strategy, further adding the portrayal and treatment of consumer loss aversion can further enhance revenue by about 1%. In addition, the dynamic fluid matching strategy proposed in this paper has the form of a semi-closed solution and thus has the advantage of high computational efficiency. It contributes both in theory and application. In theory, it is proved that the pricing strategy based on the fluid approximation method is asymptotically optimal. In terms of application, the results of this paper can provide guiding suggestions on pricing for related firms.

Key words: loss aversion, online reviews, dynamic pricing, fluid approximation

CLC Number: