PENG Geng, ZHANG Xinyuan, WANG Yanfeng, LIU Ying
In recent years, platform firms have entered into exclusivity agreements with bilateral users in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage by restricting the freedom of transactions. Most of the existing research on platform exclusivity competition focuses on the "either/or" competition on the merchant side of platforms, and little attention has been paid to the exclusivity competition on the consumer side. Through modeling analysis, this paper firstly compares the impact of symmetric exclusivity competition on pricing strategy and welfare of platforms on the merchant side, consumer side, and both sides, and finds that merchant-side exclusivity can lead to a higher level of profitability for both platforms, but only the platform with a lower perceived shielding cost can profit from consumer-side exclusivity. Merchant welfare increases marginally in the case of unilateral exclusion on the consumer side, and consumer welfare and total social welfare decrease in all three cases. The model is then extended to the asymmetric exclusion scenario, and a comparative study between symmetric and asymmetric exclusion reveals that in the asymmetric exclusion competition scenario, the welfare of the subjects decreases, except for the strong platforms, which benefit more. The conclusion of the study provides some theoretical support for the monopolistic behavior of platforms establishing "walled gardens" on the consumers' side, and it is also of great significance for strengthening the regulation of strong platforms. On this basis, this paper explores the regulatory strategy of exclusive competition, and the results show that: Merchant-side regulation has a greater impact on platform pricing and profitability, consumer-side regulation has basically no impact on the change of merchant welfare, but it can substantially improve consumer welfare, and lastly, it combines with the conclusions of the model to put forward the governance recommendations.
