Private labels in marketplaces
研究线上市场平台引入自有品牌时，与经典批发零售商不同，平台不会排挤外部卖家，反而会降低收费并差异化产品以保护卖家渠道，但相比批发模式，平台提供更低质量、更高价格，消费者剩余改善较少。
Regulators are concerned that by introducing their own private labels, dominant online marketplace operators distort competition in their own favor. This paper addresses this concern by studying how online marketplaces differ from classic retailers with a wholesale arrangement. In online marketplaces individual sellers set their own consumer prices, while the marketplace operator collects fees from their sales. I show that when introducing a private label, the marketplace operator does not have an incentive to distort competition and foreclose the outside seller. On the contrary, when introducing a private label, there is an incentive to decrease the fee charged to the outside seller and to vertically differentiate its own product in order to protect the seller’s channel. However, relative to the wholesale model of classic retailers, online marketplace operators offer a lower quality with higher consumer prices, leading to less improvement in consumer surplus and potentially less harm to the outside seller.