双边市场基于购买行为的价格歧视研究--平台企业“杀熟”行为的经济学实验

An Experimental Study on Two-sided Market and Price Discrimination Based on Purchase Behavior

由于难以获取平台企业定价数据,现有对平台企业“杀熟”行为的研究缺少实证检验,难以刻画平台企业“杀熟”定价对消费者剩余和社会福利的影响,文章的实验室实验则提供了一种有效的替代方案,并且实验结果能够为促进平台经济的健康发展提供新的思考。研究发现,当被试可以区分新老用户时,存在着稳定且显著的“杀熟”定价倾向,会对老用户收取更高价格;随着高外部性消费者组间网络外部性的提高,各实验局中被试的竞争不断加剧,其利润水平显著下降。整体而言,上述实验结果与理论预期相符,较好地验证了理论结果。

This paper designs a controllable laboratory experiment to study the pricing behavior of subjects under three pricing strategies:no price discrimination,no commitment BBPD,and commitment BBPD,and then makes an empirical test to verify the theoretical results.The findings support most of the conclusions of the theoretical analysis.On the one hand,in the BBPD situation,the behavior of“ripening pricing”is stable,and the platform always charges the old users higher prices.On the other hand,with the increase of network externalities between high externality user groups,the competition among platform companies will intensify and profits will decrease significantly,which,at this time,will increase the consumers’welfare.