| With the development of the Internet economy,the online freight platform with matching the information of both sides of the supply and demand of freight has developed rapidly,such as Huochebang,Yunmanman,Huolala,has gradually become the basic tool and basic platform of cargo transportation business.However,the increasing number of platforms has intensified the competition between platforms,which has also spawned problems such as arbitrary increase in membership fees and vicious low-price competition,and formulating a reasonable pricing strategy has become a key issue that needs to be solved for the sustainable development of online freight platforms.Therefore,this paper takes the online freight platform that provides information matching as the research object,and discusses and analyzes the pricing strategy selection of the network freight platform in different market environments.Based on the Hotelling model and Salop model,the pricing model of the online freight platform under the conditions of monopoly,duopoly competition and polyoligopoly competition is constructed,and the benefits of the three pricing strategies of only charging registration fee,only charging transaction fee and charging registration fee and transaction fee at the same time are compared and analyzed from different user attribution behaviors and market overlap situations,and the impact of different pricing strategies and related parameters on the user scale and revenue of online freight platform is discussed through numerical analysis.The results show that:(1)Under different market conditions,the optimal pricing strategy of online freight platforms is different.For monopolistic online freight platforms,adopting a pricing strategy that only charges transaction fees can obtain higher profits;For duopoly online freight platforms,the pricing strategy of charging both registration fee and transaction fee is the optimal pricing strategy only when the two-sided user order is vested.For multi-oligopoly online freight platforms,the pricing strategy of charging both registration fees and transaction fees is the optimal pricing strategy when there is market overlap such as horizontal mergers and acquisitions.(2)The scale and revenue of platform users will be affected by the degree of platform differentiation,direct network externalities and crossnetwork externalities,and their impact mechanisms will be different under different circumstances.For example,in a duopoly market,when the platform adopts two pricing strategies,charging both registration fee and transaction fee,and only charging registration fee,improving the platform differentiation will always bring more profits to the platform.However,in the multi-oligopoly market,only when the platform adopts a pricing strategy of charging both registration fees and transaction fees,the platform profit will be significantly affected by the platform differentiation.(3)Improving platform matching capabilities does not always increase platform revenue.For example,for monopoly platforms that charge registration fees,and platforms that only charge registration fees in the duopoly market when bilateral users are single vested,platform profits cannot be increased by improving platform matching capabilities.For online freight platforms in the multi-oligopoly market,only when the platform adopts a pricing strategy of charging both registration fee and transaction fee,the platform’s profit will be significantly affected by the platform’s matching ability. |
