Research on Service-Driven Benign Market with Platform Subsidy Strategy

The benign consumption of two-sided markets and the quality improvement of the supply side is the core of the sustainable development of platform ecology. This paper discusses how the platform uses personalized service values to influence the decision making of manufacturers and consumers, thus improving the health development of the platform ecosystem. By constructing the vertical differentiation model, we find that, different from the unified pricing strategy in the benchmark market, manufacturers in the platform market can implement personalized pricing, according to the different types of consumers’ quality preferences. When the platform service value is less than the product cost difference between manufacturers, low-quality manufacturers may benefit from the platform. Meanwhile, when the platform service value is greater than the product cost difference between manufacturers, the lemon market may appear and platforms should set the differentiated subsidy strategy according to the type of market consumers; this is a dominant strategy. In addition, when the number of consumers with low-quality demand in the market is large, the platform’s subsidies for high-quality products to consumers will guide consumers to buy high-quality products; this will not only promote the development of the benign market, but also improve the platform’s revenue. Finally, the sensitivity analysis shows that the platform service value has a U-shaped impact on the platform revenue and an inverted U-shaped impact on the manufacturers’ revenues.