Research On Competitive Strategies For Bilateral Platforms Considering Differences In Consumer Purchasing Power

In recent years,the integration of the Internet and industry has been deepening,and the platform economy represented by bilateral platforms has developed rapidly and has become the mainstream direction of resource allocation.Bilateral platforms have penetrated into every part of our lives,contracting our necessities of life.Consumers,as the initiators of transactions,are crucial to the development of the platform,and the platform needs to choose an appropriate competitive strategy according to the purchasing power of target consumers.Due to differences in purchasing power,consumers have differences in preference for hassle costs and differences in spatial distribution under different market types.Therefore,from the perspective of differences in consumer purchasing power,this paper studies the differences in platform types and market types,and explores how platforms should formulate strategies to expand the scale of users and how to continuously gain competitive advantages.The main research content of this paper is divided into two parts: First,it studies two platform operation strategies under consumers’ preference for hassle costs: the choice of pricing models for diversified platforms and selected platforms.Firstly,the consumer trouble costs and the platform’s bilateral user utility function and profit function under different pricing models are established and the equilibrium solution is obtained.Then,the influencing factors of the equilibrium solution are studied and the appropriate pricing strategy is given.Finally,the optimal operation strategy and pricing strategy of the platform are obtained by using Matlab simulation;Second,considering the non-uniform distribution of consumers’ purchasing power,the platform competition results under the normal distribution of consumers are analyzed,and the corresponding bilateral user utility function and profit function are established.The numerical simulation compares and analyzes the difference between the platform competition results when consumers obey the normal distribution and the uniform distribution,and analyzes the influence of different market types on the platform competition.Finally,the platform management enlightenment is given based on the case.The research results show that:(1)The selected platform strategy of the transaction fee system is better,which reduces the hassle costs of consumer transactions and improves the strength of the network effect,which is beneficial to the increase of bilateral user scale and profit.(2)The less value-added services for consumers and the more value-added services for merchants,the smaller the bilateral network effect,and the higher the pricing ratio for merchants.(3)When consumers obey the normal distribution in the market,the changes in the scale of users and profits of the two platforms with the pricing level of bilateral users are greater than the uniform distribution.(4)In the low-end market,the market share of diversified platforms is high;in the high-end market,the market share of selected platforms is high.The user scale and profit of selected platforms in different market types vary with the pricing level of bilateral users than those of diversified platforms.(5)In the mid-to-high(low-end)market,when the price gap between the two platforms is large(small),the consumer user scale of the diversified platform is larger than that of the selected platform;otherwise,the consumer user scale of the selected platform is larger than that of the diversified platform.