Research On The Bundling Strategy Of Platform Enterprises In Two-sided Markets

Bundling is commonly used non-price competition means by enterprises.With the proposal of "the network powerful nation" strategy by China,the development of the network and the non-neutral price,the extremely low marginal cost and other features that are only showed under two-sided markets,Bundling strategy is increasingly becoming a preferred competitive strategy for platform enterprises.Some of the bundling strategies are obligatory,such as consumers can only passively accept bundles of all kinds of ads in E-mail,and others are not compulsory,such as consumers can choose not to install the software that comes with it while downloading some applications or software.In this context,this paper focuses on how the platform enterprises implement the bundling strategy and the influences of the bundling on consumers' utilities and social welfare when the consumers don't have or have the preference difference to this strategy in the market.Firstly,this paper gives a comprehensive overview of the basic concepts of the bundling and this strategy implemented by the platform enterprises under unilateral and bilateral markets.Then by establishing the two-stage dynamic game model with full information,this paper analyses the different bundling strategy of enterprises and its impacts on consumers' utilities and social welfare under the monopolistic market and the duopoly market.Meanwhile,this paper goes a further step to subdivide the bundling strategy to compulsory bundling strategy and non-compulsory bundling strategy.Besides,the paper relaxes the hypothesis of consumers' preference to bundling and studies the bundling strategies of platform enterprises and its impact on the consumer utilities and social welfare while there are three kinds of consumers in the markets who have totally different attitudes to bundling(preference,hate,indifference).Finally,the fourth chapter supplemented and verified the conclusions obtained in the third chapter by numerical simulation and specific case analysis of"E-mail ? advertisement" bundling strategy of Netease and Sina.The conclusion of this paper are:whether it is in the monopolistic market or duopoly market,Firstly,the platform enterprises will make higher prices to the users who get higher extra utilities through the bundling strategy,the factors that will affect the enterprises to make prices also include the proportion of different kinds of consumers;Secondly,consumers and businesses always choose platform companies that can bring greater extra utility to themselves,and they would rather pay a higher price for this;Thirdly,the bundling strategy implemented by platform enterprises tends to increase consumer utilities and social welfare,they have positive correlation with positive extra utilities that bundling bring to users(consumers and sellers)and the proportion of consumers who prefer the bundling strategy.