The third-party group-buying platform has attracted increasing attention of scholars with its rapid development.On the surface,the network group-buying model is booming because it creates a triparfite win-win situation.Merchants can earn decent profit and increase their brand awareness through large-scale sales on group-buying websites.Group-buying helps consumers reduce their cost of information search and improve their bargaining power.Furthermore,the group-buying platform has found a very important profit model which creates a communication bridge between merchants and consumers,and then receives commissions as an intermediary.However,what is the significance of group-buying for merchants? Do merchants definitely become more profitsble by adopting group-buying strategies?This paper studies the significance of group-buying for merchants from the perspective of brand marketing or new product promotion,based on a stylized two-period game-theoretic model and considering consumer herd behavior.With the advent of Groupon.com in 2008,the third-party group-buying platform has seen phenomenal growth,which makes them become an important channel for merchants to conduct brand marketing or new product promotion.We assume merchants can choose between two kinds of marketing channels:the traditional "merchants-consumers" marketing channel and the third-party group-buying platform channel.Firstly,we discussed merchants' strategic choice between the group-buying channel and traditional channel when merchants promote their goods for consumers who are non-conformity.Afterwards we studied the influence of consumers' conformity and anti-conformity characteristics on merchants' optimal group-buying strategies.In our conceptualization,merchants who participate in the platform can enjoy sampling and advertising effects,but they have to pay the group-buying platform a certain amount of intermediary fees.The platform adopts a sharing contract with merchants who offer a deal on the platform.In addition,we model the strategic interaction between the platform and merchants as a Stackelberg leader-follower game where merchants choose discount rate,while keeping the platform's choice of revenue sharing rate.The results indicate that when consumers are non-conformity,the proportion of consumers joining the platform is the key factor for merchants to decide whether to choose the group-buying channel or not.However,when the proportion of consumers joining the platform varies in an "appropriate" range,the merchant should choose the channel according to the state of the technology of the platform and consumers' awareness about the platform.When the value of the state of the technology of the platform remains unchanged,merchants that are less well-known can gain more from offering a deal on the group-buying website,compared to high-profile merchants.Moreover,when merchants choose the group-buying platform as its brand marketing channel or new product promotion channel,both the conformity and anti-conformity of consumers will affect their optimal group-buying strategies.The conformity of consumers will force merchants to provide more benefit for consumers.The optimal profit of merchants is lower for consumers who are conformity than that for consumers who are non-conformity.Nevertheless,when consumers are anti-conformity,merchants can lower the discount rate.Merchants' optimal profit is greater than that when their consumers are non-conformity.Our research has significant managerial implications for merchants to make both gronp-buying and pricing strategies.%本文考虑消费者从众效应,从品牌或新产品推广的角度研究了团购对于商家的意义.首先探讨消费者不从众情形下,商家进行品牌推广的渠道选择问题.然后研究了消费者从众和反从众性对商家最优团购策略的影响.研究发现,在消费者不从众情形下,团购平台的消费者比例是决定商家选择团购策略的关键因素,但当加入团购平台的消费者比例在一个“恰当”的范围内时,团购网站的技术特征参数和商家知名度会起主导作用,且当团购网站技术特征参数值不变时,商家知名度越小,选择团购越有利.另外,当商謇选择团购渠道进行品牌推广时,商家的最优利润会因消费者的从众性而降低,因其反从众性而升高.
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