The impact and design of slider-based offer mechanisms in mobile commerce

The proliferation of mobile and app-based selling has led to significant changes in how offers are solicited from consumers. Slider interactions are now commonplace. Notably, many airlines (e.g., Air Canada, Icelandic Air, LOT Polish Airlines and Aer Lingus) use sliders to solicit bids for seat upgrades. Many firms have adopted sliders to receive offers for goods, services, or upgrades. Slider endpoints provide reference points and anchor offers which may influence a customer’s perception of what will constitute a winning bid. This paper’s research issue focuses on the design of sliders. Specifically, how should a manager choose the slider endpoints and the initial slider position? We provide precise analytical solutions for equilibria both for the uniform case (common in the literature) and the triangle case, which is much more realistic for applications. We show how sliders may be dynamically chosen to reflect the current information available to the retailer. Concrete approaches and advice for the management/design of sliders are provided. Our results yield implementable guidance: when buyers infer acceptance probabilities from the slider layout, deliberately off-center initialization (triangular beliefs) raises bids and revenue relative to uniform interpretations, and the optimal starting point increases with customers’ reservation-price upper bounds and available inventory. This is the first paper (to the best of our knowledge), to analytically tackle this important change in offer solicitation. As mobile commerce continues to grow, understanding these mechanisms becomes increasingly vital.