| Platform economy is an important engine for the development,and the emergence of more and more platform-based business models has attracted the attention of scholars.The platform outsources non-core business or creates value-added services with outsourcing companies,thereby attracting more two-sided users to join the platform,and then develops pricing and quality investing strategies to achieve greater profits.This kind of service outsourcing model in the two-sided market has been widely applied,for instance,Longterm Rental platform outsources decoration service,Takeout platform outsources catering delivery service,etc.Although the practical application of this model is very common,theoretical research is still very lacking.Besides,the public’s demand for platform service quality is constantly improving due to several social events,so the research of quality control in platforms and their outsourcers is particularly important.Considering the whole process from signing the contract to service operation,integrating the two-sided market theory,the service quality management theory,and the service supply chain contract theory,etc.,this paper studies two main issues: the price and quality investment decisions of two-sided market,the service quality monitoring and coordination within service outsourcing.Firstly,Quality investment to users can increase their utilities and attract them to join the platform.Based on this assumption,the paper establishes a joint decision model for price and quality investment levels in two-sided market.Considering two forms of prospective service cost separately,the analytical solutions of the optimal prices and the optimal quality investment levels under the marginal cost threshold are obtained.The two-sided price structure(subsidy/charge)conditions and changing situations of the optimal price with marginal cost,marginal utility and potential users are discussed respectively.Secondly,this paper establishes a quality monitoring and coordination model,considering the quality game between platform and service provider under symmetric information and asymmetric information,and obtains game equilibrium solutions.Then we analyze the changing situations of the optimal strategy of the two companies with discovery probability of fraud,penalty cost,monitoring cost,private interests and income factor,and finally propose three management suggestions: designing penalty mechanism,strengthening information symmetry and setting by-stage evaluation system.The conclusions of two issues have certain practical significance for the price and quality decision in the platform outsourcing activities,quality monitoring and coordination,and mechanism or contract design with the service provider. |
