Fending Off Critics of Platform Power with Differential Revenue Sharing: Doing Well by Doing Good?
研究了数字平台采用偏向小企业的差异化收入分成设计，发现这能提高总福利和产出，且平台自身最可能受益，表面让步实则自利。
Many digital platforms have accrued enormous power and scale, leveraging cross-side network effects between the sides they connect (e.g., producers and consumers or creators and viewers). Platforms motivate a diverse spectrum of producers, large and small, to participate by sharing platform revenue with them, predominantly under a linear revenue-sharing scheme with the same commission rate regardless of producer power or size. Under pressure from society, lawsuits, and antitrust investigations, major platforms have announced revenue sharing designs that favor smaller businesses. We develop a model of platform economics and show that a small-business oriented (SBO) differential revenue sharing design can increase total welfare and outputs on the platform. Although smaller producers almost always benefit from the shift in revenue sharing design, spillover effects can also make large producers better off under some conditions. More interestingly, we show that platforms are the most likely winner under a differential revenue sharing scheme. Hence, an intervention that ostensibly offers concessions and generous treatment to producers might well be self-serving for platforms and good for the entire ecosystem. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, information systems. Funding: H. K. Bhargava’s work on platform ecosystems was supported by a research excellence gift from Google Apigee in 2018. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4545 .