Research On Information Disclosure Of Firms And Pricing Strategy Of Platform Based On Product Certification

With the rapid development of digital information technology,the new industrial organization represented by the platform economy creates a great convenience for consumers.By building the bilateral market,the platform can provide buyers and sellers with a place to exchange goods,services and information.The platform model has subverted the traditional economic organization and profoundly changed consumers' production and organization mode.While platform-oriented economic changes have created great value for business organizations,they have also brought new development opportunities to society.In online retailing,consumers cannot perceive the accurate quality of the product before and after the purchase for some products with trust attributes.Quality uncertainty may have a negative impact on transaction volume of the market.In the platform economy,on the one hand,the retail platform is a member of the supply chain system;on the other hand,it is also a maker of market rules.Platform's strategies can influence the consumers' economic behavior through the output and processing of information.How the platforms eliminate consumer uncertainty about products by virtue of its information advantage on products is a problem faced by online retail platforms.In view of the information asymmetry between firms and consumers,online retail platforms provide product quality certification as a means of quality information disclosure,which can effectively alleviate consumers' uncertainty about product quality.In fact,it is in widespread use that online retail platforms' relying on information advantages to promote the transactions between buyers and sellers in the market,but few literatures have studied the issue of disclosing information under the background of platform.Therefore,based on the theory of consumer utility,this paper studies the following issues from the perspective of firms and platforms by constructing a Stackelberg dynamic game model.(1)Does applying for product certification benefit the duopoly competitors who selling products on the same retail platform? Considering the different certification fee,what is the disclosure strategy equilibrium of the two companies' game?(2)As the member of the supply chain channel and the maker of local market rules,how should the online retail platform decide the optimal certification fee to maximize its own profits? Considering the overall performance of the supply chain,what kind of certification fee should the platform design?The research results show that:(1)In a competitive market,when the true quality level of a firm is much more different from the consumers' expectation for quality,the quality information disclosure is more valuable to the firm.(2)When consumers' confidence in product quality is sufficiently high(low),as the channel of information transmission,the retail platform can set a more costly fee for information disclosure,thereby obtaining higher profit by the monopoly on the information transmission.(3)In some cases,the high-quality firm may be in a passive position when competing with the low-quality firm.The bigger relative quality superiority of the high-quality firm,the stronger willingness the firm discloses its high-quality information.Therefore,it is more possible that the low-quality firm takes a free ride from the high-quality.(4)Given consumers' confidence in the quality of the product,only when the commission rate shared by the platform from the firm is greater than a threshold,the overall performance of the supply chain will achieve the highest.