Asymmetry Information And Pricing In Two-sided Markets

With the development of the economy and society,more and more platform-operated enterprises appear in economic activities.Platform-operated enterprises cover many aspects such as portal platforms(Sina,Sohu,etc.),travel platforms(Ma-cell,e Long,etc.),recruitment platforms(51job,BOSS direct hire,etc.) and so on.The continuous development of platform-operated enterprises brought new competition among enterprises,how to survive in the new competition relationship and get better development is the common problem faced by platform enterprises managers.The theory of two-sided market is the basic theory to explain the competitive relationship among platform enterprises.Most scholars study the two-sided market in the perspective of symmetric market information,however,there are few researches in the perspective of information asymmetry.Based on this,this paper constructs a Hotelling game model to study the two-sided platform pricing strategy and platform profit change in the perspective of information asymmetry.Analyzing the pricing strategy and platform profit of two-sided platform under the two kinds of information asymmetry condition which the platform enter the market in order and the users in order,and analyzing the different user attribution structures.The study found that when platforms enter the market successively,the internal reason for the platform enterprises make merchants implement “picking one of two” is that the platform can pursue its own maximum profits.When merchants and consumers only trade on one platform,the platform obtains the most profit,the transaction of the merchant or the consumer on the second platform will damage the profit of the original platform,so the platform enterprise will enforce the merchants to make choice.When a merchant implements “picking one of two” behavior,consumers will adopt partial multi-ownership behavior,because consumers can find lower prices when consumers adopt partial multi-homing behavior.When users enter the market successively,the two-sided platform enterprises should increase the uniqueness of the platform and attract new users to join the platform,make users adopt partial multi-homing behavior.When both users adopt single-attribute behavior,the platform profit is not the biggest,which is not beneficial to the platform,so platform companies should use their differences to attract users to join in.When there is overlapping business between the two-sided platforms,the managers of the platform enterprises should pay more attention to the proportion of overlapping services of the users who entered later,because it not only affects the pricing strategies of the two sides users,but also has a greater impact on the platform profit.