关键词: 竞争平台, 数据赋能, 增值服务, 用户归属, Hotelling模型

Abstract: In the era of digital economy, data has become an important production factor for platform enterprises. E-commerce platforms implement data empowerment strategies to achieve value co-creation between the platform and users. This article is based on the bilateral market theory and the Hotelling model, considering whether the platform provides data enabled value-added services, constructs investment competition models for e-commerce platforms under two different attribution scenarios, and analyzes the equilibrium strategy choices of different platforms. The main research conclusions of this article are as follows:
(1)When competitive platforms adopt the same data empowerment value-added service investment strategy and both bilateral users are single-homing, the market share obtained by both platforms and the pricing to bilateral users will be equal. When bilateral users have significantly different preferences for the platform, the price by platforms that adopt investment strategies will be lower than that by platforms that only provide basic service. In order to achieve the optimal profit of the platform, the service fee charged by the platform to bilateral users decreases with the increase of cross-side network effects, increases with the improvement of the investment level of data-enabled value-added service, and increases with the increase in the unit preference cost.
(2)When competitive platforms adopt the same data empowerment value-added service investment strategy in the case of single-homing for consumers and partial multi-homing for sellers, the platform will have lower pricing for consumers and higher service fee for sellers. The higher the perceived level of platform data empowerment by sellers, the more conducive it is to encouraging them to adopt a multi-homing strategy. The fees charged by the platform to bilateral users is related to the cross-side network effects and platform differentiation. When the network externality coefficient on the consumer side is greater than the user preference cost, the service fee charged by the platform to sellers will increase with the increase in value-added service investment level. When the network externality coefficient on the consumer side is less than the user preference cost, the service fee charged by the platform to sellers will decrease with the increase in value-added service investment level, and the fee charged by the platform to consumers will also be the same.
(3)When competitive platforms adopt different data empowerment value-added service investment strategies, whether in the case of single-homing or partial multi-homing, in order to maintain the platform’s own competitive advantage and make the most of data empowerment investment, the platform will not only need to comprehensively consider the cross-side network effects, user preference costs, and the data empowering investment levels, but also require attention to the investment strategies adopted by competitive platforms.
The management insights obtained in this are the following: Firstly, in the process of providing data empowerment value-added services, the platform should focus on the utility analysis of bilateral users of different attribution, and adopt different service charging strategies for users of different attribution. Secondly, the platform should make good use of its own service investment level, create a differentiated data empowerment value-added service strategy, and enhance user stickiness. Finally, the platform’s data empowerment strategy helps to enhance the utility of bilateral users, and the platform should implement the data empowerment strategy in conjunction with its own and competitors’ investment level strategies.

Key words: competitive platform, data empowerment, value-added service, user attribution, Hotelling model