Study On The Impact Of Uncertainty To The Strategy Of Internet Two-sided Platforms And The Antitrust Regulation Of Two-sided Markets

When it came into the 21st century, the Internet economy has come into a period of rapid development. Not only the total size of the industry is expanding fast, but the industry categories based on the function is becoming more and more perfect. Furthermore, the change of the style of people getting access to the Internet, especially using the mobile phones, also promote the development of the Internet industry. In such context, our country gradually formed an idea of economic development of" Internet+".However, the Internet industry and traditional industries are essentially different. On the aspect of user characteristics, the Internet platforms are usually two-sided. In the aspect of industrial function, the internet industry plays an important role in the transmission of the economic trading information. When it comes to development process, the market share of the subfield of the industry is easily captured by one or several Internet giants. It is because of these differences, the analysis framework based on the traditional industries is not ideally suit for the Internet industry. So, the main work of this paper is aiming at the study of the strategy when the platform is faced with uncertainty and the related antitrust regulation problem on basis of past research and our own observation.First of all, this paper shows some special phenomenon happened in the Internet industry, finding that these events are not controllable for the Internet industry platform. That is, the existing platform is making decisions in the background of uncertainty. This paper also points out five typical kind of uncertainty that have important impacts on the platform.Then, in order to find a general way of research for all kinds of uncertainty on aspects of path, mechanism and effect, we carefully studied a lot of past findings. Finally, based on the user characteristics of the Internet platform and the realistic market environment, we decide to use the monopoly model in Rochet & Tirole (2003) as a benchmark for our analysis, and attempt to find a way to include the topic of uncertainty, and then use the new model to get research into our own theme. On one hand, the discussion points out that there are two ways through which the uncertainty may make effect on the existing platform, namely the "user way" and "buyer way". On the other hand, the paper also shows the influence of uncertainty on the strategies of the existing platform in decision making, especially in the aspects of pricing decision. Then, using the results of the model, the paper makes some reflections on the typical uncertainties, and put forward some strategies to cope with them. The paper also takes the case of mobile phone operating system changes as an example to analyze using the viewpoints of our discussion.In the end, the paper analyses the impact of uncertainty involved in aspects of "relevant market definition" and "dominant market position", and put forward our own view on the antitrust problems, especially relates to the two-sided markets. We think that if the work of market definition is not so easy to do for relevant government department, they can try other ways to directly identify market dominance and relevant behaviors, such as competition suppression, profit ratio, user’s welfare and even the perspective of transaction cost. And then, they can take proper corresponding measure to make the market right.