Strategy analysis for a digital content platform considering perishability
研究了数字内容平台在考虑产品易逝性和广告负效用时的资源投入、定价和广告策略，发现定价和广告策略恒定，资源投入随时间递减，且平台可能免费开放资源以增加广告收益。
Abstract With the vigorous development of e-commerce, digital content consumption has prospered in the consumer market. Considering the perishability of digital content products and the negative utility of advertisements on users, the paper develops a dynamic game model for the supply chain with a digital content platform and an upstream advertiser, and obtains the optimal (or equilibrium) resource investing, pricing, and advertising strategies under the centralized and decentralized decision-making cases. The main results show that the marketing strategies of pricing and advertising are constant over the planning horizon, while the operation strategy of resource investing which depends on digital content products’ perishability is decreasing over time. And, the platform may open resource for free to benefit more from advertising. Furthermore, for a certain region with relatively small price sensitivity, a counterintuitive result is obtained that the resource investing level and the profits of both members increase with the price sensitivity under the decentralized case, which is in sharp contrast to the centralized case. Finally, ignoring the product perishability in the decision-making process will cut down the resource investment level and profit, and the profit loss is intensified by a lower price or advertising sensitivity of consumers.