报告题目: Bloatware and Jailbreaking: How Consumer-Initiated Modification Interacts with Product Pricing
报告人: 耿先骏 教授
时间：6月24日15:20-16:50   
地点：行政楼128会议室

报告人简介：耿先骏，德克萨斯大学Dallas分校Jindal管理学院信息系统系副教授。他在清华大学获得工学与经济学双学士学位，之后在德克萨斯大学Austin分校信息系统系获得博士学位。他的研究兴趣涵盖多经营模式管理、电子商务的营销管理等多个领域。目前他的主要研究方向为网络环境下IT设备如何改变消费者行为和公司战略。耿教授的多项研究成果已被世界顶级管理科学类期刊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发表和录用。

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.