主题：Pricing under Consumer Habituation: The Optimality of aFamiliarity-Based Threshold Policy

消费者习惯形成下的定价策略：基于熟悉度的阈值策略最优性

时间：2025年12月1日 下午3:30

地点: 管科楼第四教室

主讲人：Yimin YU，City University of Hong Kong

Bio:虞义敏博士是香港城市大学商学院决策分析及营运学系、市场营销系教授。其毕业于明尼苏达大学双城分校，研究方向聚焦于供应链管理与服务运营领域。具体涵盖库存生产系统优化设计、供应链激励机制及定价策略等主题。他的研究成果已发表于多本国际权威商业期刊，包括Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Marketing Science, Operations Research, and Production and Operations Management。

Host: Qi Cheng

Abstract: Empirical evidence indicates that consumers experience a relative loss of excitement over time and miss their habits when refraining from consumption under repeated purchases. Despite the practices of first-time trials and welcome-back offers, how to exploit this habituation behavior through customized dynamic pricing is overlooked in the existing literature. In this paper, we analyze the long-run optimal customized dynamic pricing strategy in the presenceof consumer habituation for time/frequency-based consumption. The consumer’s willingness to pay is determined by past consumption via the habitual level of consumption. We formulate the seller’s continuous-time profit maximization problem over an infinite horizon as an optimal control problem and derive the closed-form value function and optimal pricing strategy. We identify a key condition on the willingness-to-pay function that captures both the magnitude of thehabituation effect and the saturated willingness to pay, which plays a central role in determining the seller’s optimal pricing policy. When consumers retain interest even at high levels of habitual consumption, always selling by pricing at their current willingness to pay is optimal. In contrast, if consumers lose interest when saturated, the optimal policy becomes a cutoff strategy, where the seller offers the product only when consumption remains below a critical thresholdand prices out consumers beyond it. We further examine the resulting pricing and consumption dynamics and characterize an equilibrium habitual level of consumption at which randomized promotions can be optimal. Furthermore, our key findings qualitatively hold under random consumer valuation, but with richer patterns. Our work provides a tractable,closed-form characterization of the optimal dynamic pricing policy under consumer habituation, offering a more nuanced understanding of the strategic implications of an inverted U-shaped willingness-to-pay.