Competition of Content Acquisition and Distribution Under Consumer Multipurchase
研究了消费者可同时购买多个竞争产品时，上游内容创作者的生产销售策略与下游分销商的内容获取和定价策略，发现多购买行为导致均衡中仅一家分销商获取新内容，且分销商差异化程度影响内容产量和各方利润。
In many markets, such as video streaming or information services, a consumer may purchase multiple competing products or services. The existing theoretical literature typically assumes that each consumer can buy only one product. This article explicitly models the consumer’s multipurchase behavior and examines an upstream content creator’s content production and selling strategies as well as competing downstream distributors’ content acquisition and pricing strategies. The authors find that in contrast to the case of single-product purchase, under multiproduct purchase, only one distributor will acquire the creator’s new content in equilibrium. Furthermore, when the content distributors are not highly differentiated (each having a limited amount of unique content), the content creator will reduce new content production, leading to lower profits for both the content creator and the content distributors. By contrast, when the distributors are already highly differentiated with a substantial amount of unique content, the content creator will increase its content production, leading to higher profits for both the content creator and the distributors. The authors show that their main results and insights are robust to several alternative assumptions.