Dynamic pricing with the counter-conformity, conformity and non-conformity of consumer behavior

Confronted with well-informed consumers, the firms have to take everything into consideration. Through the classic game theory, pricing mechanism is discussed with different characteristics of consumer behavior. The consumer population is heterogeneous along two dimensions: they may have an inclination towards the obedience of the public and different degrees of patience. After introducing the price deviation variables, we demonstrate that heterogeneity in both inclination and patience is important because they jointly determine the structure of optimal pricing policies. The numerical example shows that the markdown degree, the expected purchasing amount of consumers and the expected profits of the firm are increasing with the increase of the proportion of counter-conformity consumers. And we also examine whether the discount rate of capital, counter-conformity consumers and myopic consumers will have an impact on the sales. In particular, when the discount rate and the proportion of the conformity customers are too high, the expected profits of the firm are increasing mildly with the increase of the proportion of myopic customers. Therefore, the discount rate and characteristics of consumer behavior should be considered together to maximize the revenue of firms

Efficient Volumetric Method of Moments for Modeling Plasmonic Thin-Film Solar Cells with Periodic Structures

Metallic nanoparticles (NPs) support localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs), which enable to concentrate sunlight at the active layer of solar cells. However, full-wave modeling of the plasmonic solar cells faces great challenges in terms of huge computational workload and bad matrix condition. It is tremendously difficult to accurately and efficiently simulate near-field multiple scattering effects from plasmonic NPs embedded into solar cells. In this work, a preconditioned volume integral equation (VIE) is proposed to model plasmonic organic solar cells (OSCs). The diagonal block preconditioner is applied to different material domains of the device structure. As a result, better convergence and higher computing efficiency are achieved. Moreover, the calculation is further accelerated by two-dimensional periodic Green's functions. Using the proposed method, the dependences of optical absorption on the wavelengths and incident angles are investigated. Angular responses of the plasmonic OSCs show the super-Lambertian absorption on the plasmon resonance but near-Lambertian absorption off the plasmon resonance. The volumetric method of moments and explored physical understanding are of great help to investigate the optical responses of OSCs.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure