用户分享行为对社交媒体平台收益的影响

Effects of users’ sharing information on the profits of social network platforms

为了讨论用户分享信息的经济价值,构建了双边市场模型,将用户分为分享型和浏览型两类,研究分享型用户比例的变化对平台定价和收益的影响.研究发现,垄断情况下,分享型用户比例的增加提高了平台注册费和利润.竞争情况下,若商户单归属,分享型用户比例的增加降低了平台注册费和利润;若商户多归属,随着分享型用户比例的增加,平台注册费表现出倒U型变化.同时,研究发现,垄断情况以及竞争且商户多归属情况下,两类用户带给商户收益的差距越小,越有利于平台的定价和利润.

Users’ sharing information contains much economic value. Asuming there are two types of Users(sharing-type and browsing-type) on the social media, this paper develops a two-sided model and studies the impact of the ratio of sharing-type users on pricing and revenue. The results show that the monopoly platform obtains more revenues as the ratio of sharing-type users increases. However, both the platform price and profit will decrease with that ratio when there are two duopoly social media platforms in the market if the merchants are uni-homing. Moreover, the trend of price shows a reversed U-shape as the ratio of sharing-type users increases when merchants are multi-homing. Comparing the two cases of monopoly and competition with multi-homing merchants, the less the disparity of benefit vendors enjoy from interacting with users is, the more a platform enjoys, whether it is monopolistic or multi-homing.