Research Of Pricing Strategy Of Two-sided Markets

Two-sided markets theory is a new subject which rises at the area of industrial organization theory at recent years, it mainly focuses on the economic behaviors of two-sided consumers and platform which faces two groups of cumstomers with network externalities between them. Research of two-sided markets is now at beginning phase, and two-sided market structure is now distributed at software operation systems, payment cards of banks, network recruiting platforms and data service platforms of mobile communication etc. Generally speaking, research of two-sided markets has important theorical and practical meaning.like any other branch of economic theory, pricing strategy is core problem of two-sided markets theory. Related literatures of foreign economists have made considerable researches on pricing strategy of two-sided markets, incluing unsymmetrical pricing, pricing strategy when two-sided platform excludes and consumers multihoming, ect. However, the research of former literatures now is somewhat unorderly and lacks a clear clue, and we find the researches are inclined to theorical research and lack enough attention to hotspot problems of practical economic life. This essay catches hold of the core problem of two-sided markets, that is pricing strategy, and establishes a whole analysis frame of pricing strategy of two-sided markets. After this , the article analysee and researches the main problems among the analysis frame combining with hotspot problems of practical economical life of China, and gives some prolicy suggestions.This article first illustrates basic definition, classification, conditions of judgement and market structures of two-sided markets, then gives a sum up of theorical literatuers of former economists, then defines main subjects of this thesis conbining with hotspot problems of our country which is related to two-sided market, and researches pricing mode of two-sided markets and pricing strategy when platform provides services with different qualities and plaform establishes vertical and horizontal alliance.Different pricing modes have different influences to platforms, however, former literatures lack a systemic research of pricing modes of two-sided markets..Tthis article builds a model to explore the influenct to platform of different pricing modes, including subscription fee, transaction fee and two-part tarrif, and make a contrastive analysis of various pricing modes, then we analysis the relationship between price and cost of platform. After this general research of pricing mode ,this essay considersseveral pricing mode of special cases, these cases are about the behaviours of two-sided platform to enlarge services and promote competing force. As to heterogeneity of consumers, two-sided platform will provides more than one kind of service, and these services have different service qualities. However, former literature only assumes that platform provide only one kind of service, this article considers a model to explore the pricing strategy of platform to provide services with different service qualities. Besides this, this article considers pricing strategy when platform integrates with one side of platform, normally the side of product provider, we make clear the pricing strategy of platform and the enterprise which provides complementary product under monopoly and competitive environments. Then we considers the situation of horizontal integration with other platforms, that is interconnection between platforms and find out final service pricing and access fee pricing of platforms.Based on analysis of empirical cases, this article verifies the results of models using empirical cases of our country, this makes the researches more practically valuable.The final part of this article is summing up of innovation and deficiency of the research and points out future direction of the research of two-sided markets theory.