要不要Groupon：低折扣的盈利能力外文翻译 外文翻译 原文To Groupon or Not to Groupon: The Profitability of Deep Discounts Material Source:Harvard business schoolAuthor:Benjamin Edelman,Sonia Jaffe We examine the profitability and implications of online discount vouchers, anew marketing tool that offers consumers large discounts when they prepay for participating merchants goods and services. Within a model of repeat experience good purchase, we examine two mechanisms by which a discount voucher service can benefit affliated merchants: price discrimination and advertising. For vouchers to provide successful price discrimination, the valuations of consumers who have access to vouchers must systematically differ from?and be lower than?those of consumers who do not have access to vouchers. Offering vouchers is more profitable for merchants which are patient or relatively unknown, and for merchants with low marginal costs. Extensions to our model accommodate the possibilities of multiple voucher purchases and merchant price re-optimization. Keywords: voucher discounts, Groupon, experience goods, repeat purchase.1 Introduction A variety of web sites now sell discount vouchers for services as diverse as restaurants, skydiving, and museum visits. To consumers, discount vouchers promise substantial savings?often 50% or more. To merchants, discount vouchers offer opportunities for price discrimination as well as exposure to new customers and online “buzz.” Best known among voucher vendors is Chicago-based Groupon, a two-year-old startup already touting a ten-digit valuation and, purportedly, recently rejecting a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google Surowiecki 2010. Hundreds of websites offer discount schemes similar to that of Groupon. The rise of discount vouchers presents many intriguing questions: Who is liable if a merchant goes bankrupt after issuing vouchers but before performing its service? What happens if a merchant simply refuses to provide the promised service? Since vouchers entail prepayment of funds by consumers, do buyers enjoy the consumer protections many states provide for gift certificates such as delayed expiration and the right to a cash refund when value is substantially used? Must consumers using vouchers remit tax on merchants ordinary menu prices, or is tax due only on the voucher-adjusted prices consumers actually pay? What prevents consumers from printing multiple copies of a discount voucher and redeeming those copies repeatedly To merchants considering whether to offer discount vouchers, the most important question is the basic economics of the offer: Can providing large voucher discounts actually be profitable? Voucher discounts are worthwhile if they predominantly attract new customers who regularly return, paying full price on future visits. But if vouchers prompt many long-time customers to use discounts, offering vouchers could reduce profits. For most merchants, the effects of offering vouchers lie between these extremes: vouchers bring in some new customers, but also provide discounts to some regular customers. In this paper, we offer a model to explore how consumer demographics and offer details interact to shape the profitability of voucher discounts. We illustrate two mechanisms by which a discount voucher service can benefit affiliated merchants. First, discount vouchers can facilitate price discrimination, allowing merchants to offer distinct prices to different consumer populations. In order for voucher offers to yield profitable price discrimination, the consumers who are offered the voucher discounts must be more price-sensitive with regards to participating merchants goods or servicesthan the population as a whole. Second, discount vouchers can benefit merchants through advertising, by informing consumers of a merchants existence. For these advertising effects to be important, a merchant must begin with suffciently low recognition among prospective consumers.2 Related Literature The recent proliferation of voucher discount services has garnered substantial press: a multitude of newspaper articles and blog posts, and even a short feature in The New Yorker Surowiecki 2010. However, voucher discounts have received little attention in the academic literature. To our knowledge, the only prior academic study of online voucher discounts is the survey work of Dholakia 2010. In that work, Dholakia 2010 polls businesses that offered Groupon discounts. Echoing sentiments expressed in the popular press, Dholakia2010 finds mixed empirical results: some business owners speak glowingly of Groupon,while others regret their voucher promotions. Unlike the survey approach of Dholakia2010, we seek to understand voucher discount economics on a theoretical level. Our results indicate that voucher discounts are naturally good fits for certain types of merchants, and poor fits for others; these theoretical observations can help us interpret the ra