A Study On Pricing Mechanism Of Community Service Platforms-on The Basis Of Two-sided Market Theory

Two-sided market theory has become one of the forefronts and hot topics of industrial economics and enterprise management. It adds a new research perspective to industrial organization theory, that is, in the traditional sense from the study of a single firm’s organization, behavior, performance into the study of internal interaction among participants of commercial ecosystem. To study some issues about pricing, profit and social welfare in some related industries based on two-sided market theory will make corrections and supplements to many of the traditional industrial organization theory viewpoints, which may have a profound impact on the business practices and competitive strategies.As a part of Chinese community informatization construction, community service platform (CSP) has the characteristic of public welfare. On the other hand, as an important node in the process of industrialization of community service, CSP undertakes the mission of introducing marketable mechanism. This paper studies the CSP which is supported by the government and operated under the market forces, and explores the pricing issues of CSP from the perspective of economics, based on the theory of two-sided markets. Firstly, we divide the developmental stage into two phases:the assembling stage and the interest balancing stage. Then we deduce the pricing model according to the characteristic of each phase and the charging mode. Secondly, we discuss the impact of indirect network externalities, direct network externalities and search matching degree on the pricing of the CSP. Lastly, we establish a price discrimination model, expecting to explore a win-win situation.Our research shows that pricing with the purpose of optimal social welfare will produce a serious financial burden, which is not conducive to the long-term development of CSP. On the contrary, market-oriented operation is a valid guarantee for the continuing evolution of CSP; Indirect network externalities, user scale and the fixed cost for realizing the trading among users of both sides are three critical factors that affect the pricing of a platform; As an innovation of operating mechanism, CSP does user heterogeneous processing according to the price elasticity of demand of different service providers and takes the price discrimination strategy, which is beneficial for both profit maximization and social welfare optimization.