2026年第24期(总第1168期)

演讲主题：Blessing or Curse? Strategic Quality Communication in the Presence of Social Learning

主讲人：薛巍立 东南大学教授

主持人：关旭 供应链管理与系统工程系主任、教授

活动时间：2026年5月8日（周五）16:30-18:00

活动地址:管院大楼105教室

主讲人简介：

薛巍立教授为东南大学经济管理学教授、博导、院执行院长；兼任中国运筹学会理事、行为运筹与管理分会副理事长，中国管理科学与工程学会协同创新与管理研究会副主任。主要研究方向为数字化运营管理，品类与库存管理。主持国家自然科学基金重点项目在内的国家级项目5项和省部级项目2项。在国内外重要核心期刊发表学术论文40余篇，包括Production and Operations Management、Management Science、Operations Research等管理科学领域顶级期刊。

活动简介：

Social learning is often viewed as improving consumers’ access to information while reducing firms’ quality communication costs. However, this intuition may break down in the presence of consumer bounded rationality, as evidenced by blind following behavior in live-streaming commerce. We examine the impacts of social learning on a firm’s optimal quality communication strategies, i.e., voluntary disclosure versus price signaling, when considering consumer heterogeneity on rationality. Sophisticated consumers can interpret price signals and apply Bayesian inference to social learning, whereas naive consumers rely on anecdotal reasoning and ignore price signals. In contrast to the case without social learning, we find that social learning can render price signaling effective by reducing the incentive for low-quality firms to mimic high-quality firms. The proportion of sophisticated consumers and quality similarity play key roles in a firm's quality communication strategy through the interaction with social learning. When the proportion of sophisticated consumers is medium, price signaling emerges; otherwise, firms either disclose quality (if similarity is low) or pool (if high). Contrary to our intuition, social learning has nuanced effects on information transparency, firm profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare. When the quality similarity is low, the transparency of the quality information exhibits a U-shape; otherwise, it can exhibit an inverted U-shape in the proportion of sophisticated consumers. Interestingly, when social learning improves information transparency, it adversely affects market-level firm profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare, resulting in a lose-lose-lose situation. Our findings provide new insights for firms launching new products on whether to facilitate social learning (e.g., live-streaming) and whether to invest in formal quality certification.