Research On No-pricing Competitive Strategy In Two-sided Platforms

Bandcard, telecom industries, B2B/B2C, media industries, intermediary industries and other forms of industries are typical two-sided markets, which are quite common and important in our modern life, have recently received significant attention and becoming a hot in industry economy. In such markets, two or more groups of agents interact with each other via common platforms, which called two-sided (or multi-sided) platforms, and the value of participating in platform for agents in one group depends on the number of agents in another group who participant in the same platform. The theory of two-sided market did not come out until 21st century; through they have been existed for a long time. The fundamental problem in two-sided markets is how to get different groups around a platform on board in large number by setting-up a pricing model to maximize the platform's profit. Recently burgeoning literatures have come to front investigating price competitive strategies in two-sided markets, such as the impact of competition on price level and price structure. As far as we known, fewer literatures focused on non-price strategies, such common strategies as technology innovation strategy, overlapping operation strategy, tie-in sale strategy, advertising strategy and so on. As shown above, studying on non-pricing competitive strategies is very important in both real life and theory area.Based on present study, we pursued in-depth research on price discrimination strategy, overlapping operation strategy, tie-in sale strategy, advertising strategy by using game theory, principal-agent theory, operational research and cryptology theory synthetically.Firstly, reasons that the classification of price competitive strategies and non-pirce competitive strategies were given, and relative contents in each classification had been analyzed. Based on the normarl pricing model, we build price discrimination model, which the discriminatory criteria was transaction times in platform. Price discrimination strategy as one of price competitive strategies is quite common in our life. We analyzed equilibrium price, equilibrium profit and market shares in two different case that platform pursues long term maximum profit or short term maximum profit. And lastly, we compared them, and also the social welfare.Secondly, we distinguished the conception of overlapping operation, multi-homing and product difference. And then, a static model about overlapping operation strategy was build and the impact of overlapping operation strategy in equilirbrium prices were analyzed from two different cases, one was one side of agent is single-homing and the other is partial multi-homing, the other was both sides of agents are partial multi-homing. And then, the static model was extended to dynamic differential game for the long term perspective of overlapping operation strategy. We verified what we got in the two models based on the real case that yearly fees and currency in seven banks of China.Thirdly, legal tie-in sale was defined from economic point of view, and characteristics of tie-in sale in two-sided platforms were described. Based on the profit matrix of one-shot game, we build the dynamic evolutionary game to analyze the effect of tie-in sale in a long term, and still did sensitive analysis for some factors which had impact on the evolutionaly results and evolutionary paths. And then, we released the assumption all buyer agents like tie-in sale, and analyzed the the impact that buyer agents were with imperfect preference. We verified the results by the case Dangdang and Amazon.Fourthly, following the framework of advertising in economy, we build informative advertising model and persuasive advertising model, analyzed the effect of advertising, and simulated the results. Informative advertising will not affect the demand function directly, but the persuasive advertising will.Lastly, we gave some suggestions for the choice of competitive strategies from two-sided industry system views.