讲座报告主题：消费者损失厌恶下的质量披露

专家姓名：张建强

日期：2020-07-03 时间：15:30
地点：三江楼1501
主讲内容简介： Consumers experience a sense of loss when a product's quality does not match their expectations. To alleviate consumer loss aversion (CLA), firms can disclose information to reduce consumers' uncertainty about product quality and the resulting psychological loss. In this research, we investigate the implications of CLA on firm profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare when firms endogenously make quality disclosure decisions. We find that CLA leads symmetric firms to disclose quality more often. Given that CLA weakly reduces consumers'  utility from buying a product and quality disclosure is costly, intuition suggests that CLA is detrimental to firms. We find that this intuition is only true in a monopoly. Surprisingly, CLA makes both firms in a competition better off. Moreover, CLA increases firms' profit when they invest in quality disclosure instead of moneyback guarantees to respond to CLA. We also find that CLA decreases consumer surplus and social welfare. Therefore, educating consumers to improve decisionmaking skills by deliberating on future outcomes and emotions can benefit firms at the cost of consumers and society.