Development of e-Marketing Contract Structure Based on Consumer-Generated Contents and Its Optimal Strategy

摘要

A new e-Marketing contract structure is proposed, where the contract would be exchangedbetween an e-Marketing company, named Company X, and a manufacturingcompany, named Company Y, which is to promote Product Z within a group of SNSs(Social Network Services). Company X promises Company Y to generate Q positivecomments about Product Z within SNSs, and then hires K bloggers, asking themto experience Product Z and write comments about it. They are expected to play arole of pumping water so as to fulfill the contract. Each of such bloggers is paid by$c. For this service, Company Y pays Company X by the amount of $αQ. Shouldthe actual number of positive comments exceed Q, the additional payment of $βfor each positive comment beyond Q would be paid to Company X by Company Y.For controlling the risk of the actual number of positive comments to appear withinSNSs falling below Q, Company X pays the penalty of $γ for each shortage below Q.The problem for Company X is then how to determine Q and K so as to optimizeits objective. Two types of problems are considered, where the first problem is tomaximize the expected profit of Company X while the second problem is based onthe VaR (Value at Risk) approach to minimize the probability of the profit of CompanyX falling below v0 subject to having the expected profit above v1. Althoughthis problem has a flavor of the classical news vendor problem, it is more difficultbecause of its two dimensional nature. For the first problem, the exact optimal solutionis derived apart from the integer constraints and an algorithmic procedure isdeveloped for computing the optimal solution. For the second problem, it is shownthat the distribution function of the profit of Company X can be given explicitly,thereby providing a computational foundation for solving the problem. Numericalexamples are given, illustrating the stochastic structure of the e-Marketing contractand the differences of the optimal strategies for the two problems.