Research On The Choice Of Openess Of Online Trading Platform Under Different Market Structure

With the rapid development of the platform economy,the online trading platform has become the main shopping place for Chinese.The online trading platform is faced with a dilemma in terms of the governance of the openness to sellers.On the one hand,improving the openness to sellers is conducive to enhancing the scale of sellers.Under the influence of inter-group network effect,it will enhance the attraction to consumers and benefit the platform enterprises.On the other hand,improving the openness to sellers will reduce the quality of the platform,weaken its appeal to consumers and do harm to platform enterprises.In reality,some platforms with high openness,such as Taobao and Pinduoduo,have achieved success,while some platforms with low openness,such as Jingdong and Vipshop,have also achieved success.So how should the online trading platform choose the proper degree of openness? Most of the research on the platform openness focuses on the technology platform,but it is far from enough to pay attention to the online trading platform.This paper hopes to enrich the theory of platform openness governance by studying the openness of online trading platform,and to provide help for the online trading platform enterprises to choose the appropriate openness.Firstly,this paper summarizes the domestic and foreign research results on platform governance and openness,market structure and enterprise market behavior,and two-side market theory,so as to provide the theoretical basis for the follow-up study of this paper.At the same time,we find that the existing research on platform openness has the following shortcomings.(1)It mainly focuses on technology platforms.The research on other types of platforms isn't enough,and the openness of online trading platforms haven't been studied.The difference of types of platforms may affect the choice of openness.(2)It hasn't considered the impact of competition on the choice of openness,and the difference in market structure may also affect the choice of platform openness.These shortcomings point out the direction for the follow-up study of this paper.Then,this paper studies the choice of platform openness under the situation of monopoly and oligopoly.We discusses the influence mechanism of the platform openness under different market structure on the profit of the platform enterprise,the choice of the platform openness and the influencing factors of the optimal openness,as well as the social welfare under the optimal openness.The main findings are as follows.(1)Openness affects the profits of platform enterprises by influencing the demand scale of sellers and inter-group network effect.High demand scale of sellers and high inter-group network effect increases the profits of platform enterprises under the monopoly situation.Under the situation of oligopoly competition,they intensify the platform competition and reduce the profits.(2)When inter-group network effect of buyers and sellers and quality cost differences are large,monopoly platform enterprises tend to choose high openness.When intra-group network effect of sellers,buyer's quality preference,buyer's quality expectation,and the proportion of high-quality sellers are large,monopoly platform enterprises tend to choose low openness.These factors have opposite influence on the oligopolistic competition platform to choose openness.(3)Inter-group network effect and buyers' quality preference have different impacts on social welfare under different market structures.The effects of buyers' quality preference on social welfare are influenced by optimal openness.