Research On Pricing Strategy Of Intra-City Freight Platform Considering Service Sensitivity

In recent years,the Internet has penetrated into all aspects of people’s lives,and the "Internet +" model has been applied in various fields.The intra-city freight market has also seized this opportunity,and the intra-city freight platforms such as Lalamove and GOGOX have been born.They have attracted a large number of cargo owners and car owners to settle on the platform with their massive vehicle and cargo information and efficient matching rate.However,with a large amount of capital entering the game one after another,the competition in the intra-city freight market is fierce,and the subsidy war continues.Although this kind of money-burning behavior can attract users in a short period of time,it is by no means a longterm strategy.If the intra-city freight platform wants to stand out,it must return to its essential business-service.Therefore,this paper introduces service sensitivity,considers two price strategies of unified pricing and discriminatory pricing,and studies the pricing strategies of intra-city freight platforms in monopoly and competitive markets.In the monopoly market,a unified pricing model and a discriminatory pricing model are constructed taking into account the service sensitivity of cargo owners and the cost coefficient of service quality of car owners,and the optimal pricing,scale and profit of the platform are obtained.The study found that when the average service quality of the discriminatory pricing strategy is higher than that of the unified pricing strategy,the discriminatory pricing strategy is better than the unified pricing strategy,and the discriminatory pricing strategy should be selected at this time;otherwise,the platform should choose the unified pricing strategy.When cargo owners are more sensitive to service quality,the platform will increase the pricing for car owners and cargo owners.When the cost of service quality for car owners increases,the platform will appropriately reduce the pricing for car owners and increase the pricing for cargo owners.The larger the proportion of car owners with high service sensitivity in the market,the lower the price of cargo owners,the higher the price of car owners,and the greater the profit of the platform.As the service quality of the platform improves,the platform will increase the price of car owners and reduce the price of cargo owners.The platform should encourage car owners to improve service quality while controlling service costs,so as to attract more cargo owners.In the competitive market,this paper combines the Hotelling model with the characteristics of the freight platform to innovate,constructs the competitive model of three strategic situations,and obtains the optimal pricing decision of the platform.The results show that: when the two platforms implement uniform pricing,the greater the service quality gap between the two platforms,the greater the profit gap;the gap in service quality of car owners between the platforms increases,the dominant platform will increase the pricing of cargo owners,while the inferior platform will decrease the pricing of cargo owners,and the pricing of car owners is uncertain.If the car owners can pay less cost on the platform to meet the service demand of the cargo owner,the dominant platform will increase the price of the car owner,while the inferior platform will reduce the price of the car owner.When one platform implements discriminatory pricing and the other implements unified pricing,discriminatory pricing platforms have a competitive advantage due to differentiated services;the larger the proportion of car owners with high service sensitivity in the market,the higher the discriminatory pricing platform charges cargo owners and car owners,the higher the unified pricing platform charges cargo owners,and the lower the charges for car owners.The profit gap between the two platforms is widening.When both platforms implement discriminatory pricing,if the service quality gap between the platforms increases,the dominant platform charges the cargo owners lower and the car owners higher,and the inferior platform charges the cargo owners higher and the car owners lower.The gap in user scale between them has widened,and the profit gap has also increased.Therefore,the intra-city freight platform should always pay attention to the market dynamics,understand the user needs,timely adjust the price strategy and service strategy.