Pricing decisions of seller and speculative strategic customers

Abstract

We study the seller's optimal two-period pricing policies when speculative behaviors exists: strategic customers with heterogenous valuation make the tradeoff among price, consumption valuation, speculative benefit and availability to decide whether to be a consumer or transfer into speculators. We get the speculators' resale behavior and the seller's pricing decision. Our research suggests that the strategic customers with valuation being in a middle range will choose to speculate. Besides, we propose the speculators and seller's optimal pricing strategies.