تاثیر ارزش مشتری و ساختار قدرت در تصمیم گیری های انتخابی زنجیره عرضه و تصمیم گیری های قیمت گذاری The effect of customer value and power structure on retail supply chain product choice and pricing decisions

1 Introduction In respond to an increasingly fierce market competition and meet diverse customer demand, the production and sale substitutable products have become a common behaviour of manufacturers and retailers (Draganska and Jain, 2006). For example, Nike Inc. designs and produces shoes with different kinds of styles, colours, qualities, and functions all the year around. And just about one year ago Apple Inc. released iPhone SE, however, the iPhone 7, a new generation mobile phone, has been in a sale at the present time. What’s more, the other older versions such as iPhone 6/6s are still on sales. From the perspective of customers, product diversification has led customers to hold different customer values or customer reservation prices in different products due to their styles, colours, qualities and so on (Holbrook, 1999). For a newer or higher-quality product, the customer may hold higher reservation price than others (Martin, 1996), and customers determine their buying decisions by comparing their reservation price with the actual price of the product (Kaplan et al., 2011). Consumer behaviour is becoming more and more rational. The price factor cannot be considered as the only pricing decision-making reference any more. Therefore, the customer value has become one of the importance factors that influence customer’s product choice (Shioda et al., 2011). From the perspective of manufacturers and retailers, there exist phenomena that some stores, such as online stores or the stores in poor regions, may only sell specific types of products, and on the contrary, others may sell all kinds of products. Further, the same-type product in different stores which serve for different customers may labelled with different prices (Xia et al., 2004). Therefore, big challenges of product choice and pricing decisions have arisen to both manufacturers and retailers (Winer, 1986; Petroshius and Monroe, 1987; Akcay et al., 2010; Ferrer et al., 2010).