Group Buying via Social Network ∗ Fei Shi† Yong Sui‡ Jianxia Yang§ May, 2014 Abstract This paper studies a special selling strategy, group buying, under which consumers enjoy a discounted group price if the committed purchases exceeds the specified minimum size within a certain time period. Introducing social network among consumers, we analyze group buying from social advertising perspective. We characterize the optimal group buying strategy for a firm and investigate the effect of social network on group buying strategies. We provide suffi- cient conditions under which group buying strategy is more profitable than traditional private selling strategies and more effective than traditional advertising. Keywords: Group Buying, Advertising, Social Network JEL Classification: D85, L12, D83 ∗We are grateful to Cheng-Zhong Qin for helpful comments. Yang gratefully acknowledges financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71103065), 2011 Shanghai Young College Teacher Training Subsidy Scheme, the Humanities and Social Sciences Campus Fund of East China University of Science and Technology (Grant No. YN0157129), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. WN1122003). †Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. E-mail:
[email protected] ‡Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. E-mail:
[email protected] §School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology. E-mail:
[email protected] 1 1 Introduction Group Buying, as a new selling mechanism, has generated increasing attention in both online busi- ness industry and academia. While group buying has long existed in certain industries1, the Internet and recent emergence of social media dramatically reduced the transaction cost for different buyers to form a purchase group so as to qualify the discount price.