O2O Platform Choice,Heterogeneity And Enterprise Performance

With the development of information technology and the coming of the big data era,the electronic commerce becomes mature day by day.Having the advantages in technical,political,economic and social ways,O2O(Online-to-offline)commerce has become a booming business,following the B2 C,C2C commerce.However,joining a platform is a double-edged sword for the supply side firms.Therefore,firms must attach importance to O2 O platform choice.Can O2 O platforms facilitate performance improvement of supply-side firms? Whether the relationship between firms' performance and O2 O platform choices differs with firms' tendency of platform choice? Business managers must take these problems seriously.This work uses a sample of 1918 cinemas in China film industry and employs Propensity Score Matching(PSM)to investigate the causal relationship between platform choice and performance of supply side firms.The paper presents hypotheses based on contingency resource based view.Moreover,the work chooses tendency of platform choice,material resources,and reputation resources as threshold variables to study heterogeneity effects on business performance after joining platform.In this work,the study finds that the causal relationship between platform choice and performance of firms is significant.As the Internet platform is an important heterogeneous resource for firms,joining O2 O platform can improve firms' innovation ability.Besides,joining O2 O platform companies can increase managers' analysis ability of external environment.Therefore,joining the platform can bring firms' performance increased by reducing the uncertainty of environment analysis.In addition,the work also finds that with the improvement of tendency of platform choice,joining platform brings firms higher performance.The differences of material resources redundancy lead to the differences of innovation ability,and reputation resources are also an important source of competitive advantage.Firms with high tendency of platform choice often have more redundant resources,it will be conducive to mutative and gradual innovation.Also high tendency firms often have higher electronic word-of-mouth.Thus joining O2 O platform could bring firms with high tendency of platform choice higher performance.The conclusions of this work have management implications for supply side firms and platform owners.On one hand,supply side firms need to realize that from the whole industry,joining O2 O platform can increase the business performance,but the differences among firms is huge and the different characteristics lead to differentperformance.Hence,in order to achieve the purpose of maximizing profits,firms need to measure the gain and loss of joining O2 O platform based on their own characteristics,resources and capabilities to choose whether or not to join the platform.On the other hand,platform owners can use tendency of platform choice to attract targeted high-quality firms and to lay a solid foundation for platform system.