平台竞争一定能提高信息匹配效率吗?——基于中国搜索引擎市场的分析

Does Platform Competition always Improve the Efficiency of Information Transmission? A Case Study of China’s Search Engine Market

互联网经济促进了商业模式的变化,各类平台成为生活中不可或缺的部分,但虚假信息、假冒产品等问题也带来了不可忽视的负面影响。本文研究了平台作为供需协调者时的信息策略,揭示了平台在不同竞争条件下控制用户信息的策略动机和相应的结果。研究表明,竞争环境下平台的策略行为会加剧市场中的信息不对称。中国搜索引擎市场的案例证明搜索引擎在技术上实现的信息匹配效率与市场竞争策略存在根本性冲突,搜索引擎对夸张或虚假的广告存在策略性的宽容动机,导致搜索结果出现“劣币现象”。对虚假信息的惩戒、搜索中立原则的倡导是对平台进行监管的关键,也是互联网经济健康发展的制度基础。

The Internet platform economy has experienced a burst of growth since 2010. A wide variety of platforms improves the efficiency of both information matching and source allocation between supply and demand. However, serious problems such as unfair competition and poor product quality have emerged. Well-known examples include counterfeit goods on Taobao, false advertisements on Baidu, job recruitment traps on Ctrip. These incidents have had a substantial negative economic impact and have led to calls for antitrust regulation of major platforms. Traditionally, fair competition is considered a prerequisite for market efficiency;however, for platforms whose inputs and outputs are “information”, does competition still promote efficiency in information matching? Based on a two-sided market framework, the paper examines the profit levels of search platforms that provide complete and incomplete information in competitive and monopoly market structures. The incentive to provide different information strategies is deduced from inter-platform competition, and the origin of adverse selection of product quality in a platform economy is revealed by analyzing the evolution of the search engine market in China. As the theoretical model shows, there is a trade-off between market competition, profit level, and consumer cognitive ability. The more competition there is in the market, the lower the consumer s cognitive ability should be when the platform aims to maximize profit;therefore, the platform has a strong incentive to provide incomplete information. There is a strong possibility that structural competition could induce a platform to provide incomplete information and reduce information matching efficiency. In general, consumers do not have the ability to determine the authenticity of information. Fierce competition could induce unfair competitive behavior in the case of inefficient governance and regulation, which could be the key reason for the existence of false information in the context of rapid expansion of Internet platforms. This paper finds evidence that the business practices of the largest search engine is consistent with the theoretically optimal information strategy in a competitive market condition, namely providing incomplete information to users. In its early stages, the primary products provided by Baidu were music and video searches, without proper copyright information. Baidu had already gained a large amount of users when the inevitable legal challenges over copyright issues occurred. Later on, Baidu made a great effort to expand its product line in various Internet-related markets to increase user stickiness, which kept its market share above 80%. Ultimately, as a monopolistic platform, Baidu has become unwilling and unable to supply objective, high-quality information to users, because of previous data accumulation and business strategy inertia. As a general search engine, Baidu has done little to improve the quality of search results, instead focusing on cashing in on its Internet traffic and product ecosystem. This paradox leads to the current co-existence of high growth and low quality. As discussed in the paper, once a platform feels threatened by market competition, an incomplete information strategy may be triggered. The platform thus harms efficiency as a “visible hand”, resulting in efficiency loss at the total market level and low quality problems at the individual product level. In general, the market efficiency improvement associated with advances in information technology co-exists with the market efficiency loss of competitive strategy. In a narrower sense, the paid listing mechanism reduces R&D and production costs under current budget and technology constraints, which reduces industrial technological progress. Ultimately, adverse selection would prevail in the Internet platform market in the long term.