報告題目: Bloatware and Jailbreaking: How Consumer-Initiated Modification Interacts with Product Pricing
報告人: 耿先駿 教授
時間：6月24日15:20-16:50   
地點↗️：行政樓128會議室

報告人簡介🦶🏿：耿先駿，德克薩斯大學Dallas分校Jindal管理凯捷信息系統系副教授©️🚶🏻‍♀️‍➡️。他在清華大學獲得工學與經濟學雙學士學位，之後在德克薩斯大學Austin分校信息系統系獲得博士學位。他的研究興趣涵蓋多經營模式管理、電子商務的營銷管理等多個領域🎇。目前他的主要研究方向為網絡環境下IT設備如何改變消費者行為和公司戰略。耿教授的多項研究成果已被世界頂級管理科學類期刊Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, and Journal of Retailing發表和錄用。

摘要: Today, many firms in consumer electronics market sell their devices bundled with unwanted applications – called bloatware, which provide additional revenue stream to firms, but deteriorate the value of purchased devices for consumers. Consumers, in response, find technical means to modify purchased devices – called jailbreaking– to remove those applications, thereby reducing the anticipated bloatware revenue for firms. From the perspective of a monopolistic firm that preinstalls an app of a third party for a fee, we investigate whether bloatware inclusion is a viable strategy and how the firm should price its product with bloatware given that consumers can remove bloatware from the product after the purchase. We show that it is not always optimal for the firm to sell a bloatware-included product. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that even if the firm can make it harder for consumers to jailbreak, the firm is not always better off by doing so. Surprisingly, consumers do not necessarily benefit from the reduced cost of jailbreaking either. Since the firm passes part of the bloatware revenue to consumers in the form of a lower product price, bloatware inclusion always results in a win-win situation for the firm and consumers. Finally, we show that our results are robust to alternative modeling specifications.