The Impact Of Asymmetric Network Effect On Cybermediaries' Market Structure

With the increasing influence of information technology on the socio-economic and every aspect of life, the cybermediary, as an important platform used by enterprises when engaged in e-commerce, has developed a lot in these years. As a typical network industry, in theory, cybermediary should form a monopolized market structure as other network industries like telecommunications, while in reality, most sub-sectors of cybermediary do not have a monopolized market structure, like C2C market-place industry, although the enterprise can be a monopoly, it can not obtain monopoly profits.Clearly, the market structure of cybermediary is different from that of other network industries, because the intermediary service supplied by cybermediary has special asymmetric network effects on cybermediary industry. This article chooses the perspective of asymmetric network effects to analyze the market structure of cybermediary industry. Different from existing research, this article relaxes the assumption of homogenous cybermediaries, considering that the influence of the technology difference between cybermediaries and the existence of non-independent cybermediaries on cybermediary market structure. Obviously, this article studies a more practical significance.Based on this idea, this article firstly defines the concept of asymmetric network effects, focusing on analyzing the asymmetric network effects of intermediary services provided by cybermediaries. In order to analyze the influence of asymmetric network effects on cybermediary market structure, this article studies the influence asymmetric network effects do to industry barriers to entry, the degree of product difference and the enterprises' competitive strategies of cybermediary. On this basis, with the assumption of technology difference between cybermediaries, this article introduces two competition models to analyze different market structures of the competition between independent cybermediaries and the competition between non-independent cybermediary and independent cybermediary. The results show that the technology difference between cybermediaries will influence the cybermediary market structure. And the technological superiority will strengthen the market position of enterprise. And also, compared to independent cybermediaries, it is easier for non-independent cybermediaries to enter the market, and it is very difficult for incumbent enterprise to monopolize the whole market. The final past of this article chooses two typical cybermediaries worldwide to carry out case studies. The success of search engine company Bing from Microsoft and the quick development of huge retailers alliance B2B marketplace all test the conclusions of this article very well.