Impact of Own Brand Product Introduction on Optimal Pricing Models for Platform and Incumbent Sellers
Time：Saturday, May 8, 9：00-11:00 a.m. Beijing Time
Location：Tencent Conference（ID：137 597 383）
Speaker：Hsing Kenneth Cheng, University of Florida
Abstract：
Impact of Own Brand Product Introduction on Optimal Pricing Models for Platform and Incumbent Sellers
Sales on the e-commerce platform in the United States have experienced explosive growth and are projected to surpass 740 billion in 2023. The expansion of the platform’s traditional role as a platform into an online marketplace and the introduction of its own brand products have stoked a huge fear among the incumbent sellers. The platform’s unfair anti-competitive practice further aggravates the situation. Consequently, politicians and regulators have proposed prohibiting platforms from introducing own brand product in order to protect the incumbent sellers. This study addresses two research questions of critical interest to both the policy makers and the incumbent sellers. First, is the platform’s introducing its own brand product always detrimental to the incumbent sellers? Second, how effective is the proposed policy in terms of protecting the incumbent sellers? We examine the impact of the platform’s own brand intro- duction on the incumbent sellers under two prevailing sell-on and sell-to pricing contracts. We find that the proposed legislation “that prohibits platforms from both offering a marketplace for commerce and participating in that marketplace” does not have the desired outcome of helping the incumbent sellers. Instead, it forces the platform to adopt only the sell-to contract with own brand introduction that hurts the sellers under most market conditions. Interestingly, when the own brand introduction is banned under the sell-to contract, the incumbent sellers can be better off because the platform’s strategic reaction to the enforcement can lead to the best scenario for the incumbent sellers. If the ban is imposed on both the sell-on and sell-to contracts, the plat- form’s best response is to add another new brand competing with the incumbent sellers, which can also help the incumbent sellers, however, not as much as in the case of the enforcement only under the sell-to contract.
Introduction：
Professor Cheng is the John B. Higdon Eminent Scholar and Department Chair of Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at The University of Florida. His research interests focus on interdisciplinary information systems issues involving information technology, economics, management, marketing, and operations management with specific emphasis on big data and business analytics, economic and policy issues of information technology and the internet, electronic commerce, software pricing strategy, and supply chain management. He was ranked 20th (for the period of 2009-2011), 16th (for the period of 2010-2012), and 32nd (for the period of 2015-2020) among the world’s top-100 researchers in information systems based on publications on the top three information systems journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Journal of Management Information System.
