关键词: 超长预售, 区块链, 信息披露, 竞争博弈, 价格补贴

Abstract: Advances in information and communication technology have driven the rapid development of the digital economy, leading to profound changes in the consumption field. Among them, advance selling of e-commerce has attracted much attention and developed rapidly in recent years, forming a sales model of “collecting goods, reducing costs and selling accurately”. However, it has also caused problems.For example, the ultra-long pre-sale time leads to a lack of consumer confidence. In order to cope with competition between multiple platforms and within platforms, in addition to relying on price advantages, reducing inventory has also become an inevitable choice for merchants. Merchants usually organize production after receiving orders. Since it is pre-sale production, consumers have great uncertainty about the product quality and the time of receiving goods, so their purchase intention will decrease. For a long time, e-commerce sellers and consumers are full of great pressure under advance selling.
To promote the sales of pre-sale goods in the ultra-long advance selling, it is vital to disclose product information. By disclosing product information, consumers’ perceived risk is reduced and their willingness to buy increases. This can not only improve the revenue of sellers and the e-commerce platform, but also promote the more standardized implementation of pre-sale activities. Compared to the traditional methods, blockchain guarantees the data after being linked, non-tampering and traceable, ensuring the authenticity of information disclosed. At present, the usage cost is one of the key factors restricting the application of blockchain by the e-commerce platform and sellers. So, to reward the seller for using blockchain, the e-commerce platform offers the subsidy price. Therefore, this paper introduces the authenticity of information disclosure guaranteed by blockchain into the ultra-long advance selling, and constructs a three-party game model dominated by one e-commerce platform and two competing sellers. Specifically, considering the four scenarios in which neither of the two sellers uses blockchain (NN), only the dominant seller uses blockchain (BN), only the inferior seller uses blockchain (NB), and both of the two sellers use blockchain (BB), the optimal information disclosure strategy of the two presale sellers and the optimal price subsidy of the e-commerce platform are investigated based on the impacts of the three factors of the pre-sale time, the level of information disclosure, and the consumer’s trust of disclosed information on the consumer’s utility by solving the single-stage Stackelberg game model.
The findings of this paper are as follows: (1)The equilibrium outcomes under four scenarios are obtained, and further the impacts of blockchain use and sellers’competition on the three-party decision-making are discussed. (2)In the case of BB, the e-commerce platform has free riding behavior. That is, the unit subsidy price is zero, and its profit is higher than that of NN. (3)The cases NN and BB constitute the set of implementation schemes of two sellers. The specific scheme choice is determined by consumers’trust in disclosed information and cost coefficient of applying blockchain. When consumers’trust is low, even if cost coefficient of blockchain application is high, two sellers are willing to adopt BB scheme; when consumers’trust is at a high level, both sellers will no longer use blockchain. (4)Through numerical examples, this paper discusses the influence of other parameters on the choice of implementation schemes. The results show that when two sellers tend to be homogeneous, the e-commerce platform and two sellers only adopt BB scheme.
In the era of digital economy, using game theory to study competition and cooperation helps to accelerate the high-quality development of digital economy. This paper aims to provide theoretical reference for e-commerce platforms and sellers that adopt advance selling on how to implement blockchain for information disclosure. In the subsequent research, the impact of the subsidy price on blockchain application could be further studied. For example, it is reasonable that the e-commerce platform first decides the subsidy price, and then two competing sellers decide whether to apply blockchain. Moreover, the impact of blockchain application on the pre-sale price decision-making could also be discussed.

Key words: ultra-long advance selling, blockchain, information disclosure, competition game, price subsidy