Probabilistic Selling with Unsealing Strategy: An Analysis in Markets with Vertical-Differentiated Products

Probabilistic selling is a retail strategy in which consumers purchase products without knowing their exact identities until after purchase, with various applications like gaming and retail; a real-world practice involves retailers may unsealing and reselling goods to meet consumer demand for transparency. This disrupts manufacturers’ strategies designed to adopt the uncertainty for segmentation and pricing. Using a vertically differentiated supply chain model structured as a Stackelberg game framework, this study examines how transparency from retailer unsealing affects profitability, consumer surplus, and market dynamics. Key findings include the following: (1) Unsealing increases retailer profits by aligning pricing with heterogeneous consumer willingness to pay. (2) Introducing a manufacturer’s direct channel reduces unsealing profits via price competition. (3) Unsealing creates conflicts between manufacturers’ design goals and retailers’ profit-driven incentives. By applying a Stackelberg game framework to model unsealing as a downstream transparency decision, this work advances the probabilistic selling literature by offering a structured approach to analyzing how downstream transparency and retailer strategies reshape probabilistic selling and supply chain dynamics. It highlights the need for manufacturers to balance segmentation, pricing, and channel control, offering insights into mitigating conflicts between design intentions and downstream market behaviors.