报告人简介：
李刚，西安交通大学管理学院教授，博士生导师。长期致力于源自中国实践，面向世界视野的研究。主要研究领域为供应链管理与电子商务、分享经济运营管理，运营管理和市场营销/信息系统交叉学科研究等。在Decision Sciences, European Journal of Operational Research, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management等SCI/SSCI期刊发表论文30多篇，主持国家自然科学基金重点项目等国家级课题5项，获得教育部人文社科优秀成果二等奖等省部级奖励7项。
报告摘要：
We study return shipping insurance (RSI) policies prevalent on major platforms such as taobao.com and JD.com. A retailer on the platform can purchase and bestow RSI on consumers (RRSI) or offer an option for consumers to purchase RSI (CRSI). Having either RSI, consumers will be partially compensated by an insurer for their shipping cost associated with product returns. As consumers’ uncertainty of product fit is realized only after purchase, their purchase decisions of CRSI may lead to post-purchase regret. Considering consumers’ information-processing capability heterogeneity and anticipated regret, we investigate the optimal RSI policy for a monopolistic online retailer and an insurer. We show that the retailer is willing to offer RRSI only if the retailer’s return handling cost is not too high and consumers’ return shipping cost is in an intermediate range; otherwise, consumers’ strong propensity to the uninsured regret may stimulate them to purchase RSI. Under the optimal RRSI policy, compared with the benchmark in the absence of RSI, the retailer always charges a higher product price, surprisingly, expanding consumer demand but exacerbating the adverse selection problem. In contrast, under the optimal CRSI policy, the retailer sets a lower product price, resulting in consumer demand shrinkage but mitigated adverse selection problem. Counterintuitively, RRSI always leads to lower consumer surplus and even a lower social welfare while CRSI may lead to a “win-win-win” situation for the retailer, insurer, and consumers. Further, we uncover that the retailer should adopt RRSI more when consumers have to pay a restocking fee for product returns.
