讲座预告 | Optimal nonlinear pricing in social networks under asymmetric network information 社会网络信息不对称下的非线性最优定价

讲座主题：Optimal nonlinear pricing in social networks under asymmetric network information社会网络信息不对称下的非线性最优定价

讲座时间：12月18日15：00-16：00

讲座地点：25教学楼A区3C教室

主讲人：张阳

主讲人简介：

Dr. Yang Zhang studies social and economic networks and behavioural operations management. His works have been published on Production and Operations Management, and are currently revisedfor Operations Research (for the third round review) and Management Science. Yang’s research has received fundings from National Natural Science Foundation of China, Beijing Natural Science Foundation, and National Science Foundation (United States).

Dr. Zhang has taught supply chain modeling, game theory, and design of experiment (among others) to undergraduate, graduate, and professional students in Industrial Engineering and Business school in China, Germany, and United States.

讲座内容：

We study the optimal nonlinear pricing of products and services in social networks, where customers are strategic and their consumption exhibits local externality. Customers know about their local network characteristics but the selling firm only has knowledge of global network. We develop a solution approach using calculus of variations to tackle this non-standard principal-agent problem faced by the firm. We show that the optimal pricing compromises the capitalization of the susceptibility to neighbor consumption with the motivation of one's own consumption, which gives rise to a menu of quantity premium or quantity discount. Applying our results to the random graph (a special case of the social network model we use), we find that the pricing scheme should not discriminate by network positions; consequently, the firm can offer a simple uniform price. We conduct robustness checks of our results with two way connections, and compare our model to linear pricing.