To influence demand, some online retailers post messages (e.g., “5 units or less left in stock”) on their product pages to signal impending stockouts. These “scarcity” messages provide consumers “partial” inventory information, revealing only an upper bound on the number of units available for sale. To examine the impact of these messages, we obtained price and sales data from an online‐retailer website across a sample of durable goods before and after the retailer posted the messages over multiple inventory‐replenishment cycles. We then used these data to assess empirically the effect of these messages on these products' daily sales. We find that disclosing these messages can decrease daily sales by an average of 17.60%. This finding suggests that scarcity messages such as these can have a negative influence on the sales prospects of durable goods. We also observe, on the other hand, that price discounts are quite effective in increasing sales and offsetting the losses induced by scarcity messages. On average, a reduction of 1% in stock keeping unit price increases daily sales by approximately 3%. Therefore, relative to disclosing scarcity messages, price discounts are a much more effective tool at increasing inventory turns.

中文翻译：

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披露库存稀缺消息对在线零售销售的影响

为了影响需求，一些在线零售商在其产品页面上发布消息（例如，“剩余5个单位或更少库存”），以表示即将缺货。这些“稀缺”消息为消费者提供了“部分”库存信息，仅揭示了可供出售的商品数量的上限。为了检查这些消息的影响，我们在零售商在多个库存补充周期内发布消息之前和之后，从耐用品样本的在线零售商网站获取了价格和销售数据。然后，我们使用这些数据来凭经验评估这些消息对这些产品的每日销售额的影响。我们发现，公开这些消息可以使平均每日销售额减少17.60％。这一发现表明，诸如此类的稀缺信息可能会对耐用品的销售前景产生负面影响。另一方面，我们还观察到，价格折扣在增加销量和抵消因稀缺信息而造成的损失方面非常有效。平均而言，库存单价降低1％，则每日销售额将增加约3％。因此，相对于公开稀缺消息，价格折扣是增加存货周转率的更为有效的工具。