Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
个性化定价下守门人与消费者偏好的内生设计
Gatekeepers and the Endogenous Design of Consumer Preferences under Personalized Pricing
摘要
We develop a Hotelling duopoly model of competition on a gatekeeper platform in which firms choose between uniform pricing and personalized pricing. Implementing personalized pricing requires access to a platform-provided pricing technology and entails a per-transaction fee set by the platform. The platform also designs rankings and recommendations that affect the distribution of consumers between loyal and marginal types. We show that the platform may strategically reshape the demand environment to make personalized pricing more attractive to firms and thereby raise the fee it can charge. By reallocating mass from loyal to marginal and more disloyal consumers, the platform intensifies competition under uniform pricing and relaxes firms’ adoption constraint. Excessive centralization, however, erodes the rents that sustain fee extraction, so the platform chooses an interior degree of demand centralization. Relative to a no-manipulation benchmark, this reallocates surplus toward the gatekeeper and away from firms and consumers. When the platform also appropriates a share of seller profits, its incentives may reverse: it may favor loyalty-enhancing designs that soften downstream competition. The analysis highlights how platform monetization and recommendation design jointly determine downstream competition and its welfare consequences.
中文摘要
我们构建了一个霍特林双寡头竞争模型，研究企业在守门人平台上选择统一定价与个性化定价的竞争行为。实施个性化定价需要获取平台提供的定价技术，并支付平台设定的每笔交易费用。平台还设计排名和推荐机制，影响消费者在忠诚型与边缘型之间的分布。研究表明，平台可能策略性地重塑需求环境，使个性化定价对企业更具吸引力，从而提高其可收取的费用。通过将消费者从忠诚型重新分配至边缘型及更不忠诚的群体，平台加剧了统一定价下的竞争，并放宽了企业的采纳约束。然而，过度集中化会侵蚀支撑费用提取的租金，因此平台会选择适度的需求集中程度。与无操纵基准相比，这种重新分配将剩余向守门人转移，而减少企业和消费者的剩余。当平台同时抽取卖方利润的一部分时，其激励可能发生逆转：平台可能倾向于增强忠诚度的设计，以缓和下游竞争。分析揭示了平台货币化与推荐设计如何共同决定下游竞争及其福利后果。