Author(s)

Jiaqing Wang

Corresponding Author

Jiaqing Wang

ABSTRACT

With the emergence of online new retail platforms and pricing strategies boosted by Big Data, price discrimination has triggered extensive attention in the business field, from the legal, commercial and ethical perspectives. This study adopts JD.com, one of the pioneering online new retail platforms, as a case study to investigate the relationship between user portrait, sales volume and discounted price to show the degree of price discrimination. Results show that gender, age and marital status are critical factors in price discrimination of online new retail platforms. Instead of price discrimination, dynamic pricing is a more accurate word in describing behaviours of online retailers. This paper offer suggestions for online new platform to legally design dynamic pricing, such as targeted coupons and festival promotion, based on different user portraits. For further studies, comparative studies on dynamic pricing on different online new retail platforms, both in China and Foreign countries, are suggested.

KEYWORDS

Price Discrimination, User Portrait, Online Retail