ABSTRACT

Multi-sided platforms must make decisions on both pricing and engineering investment and must continually adjust them as the platform scales over its lifecycle. Engineering investments can be allocated to features that improve a platform’s standalone value, social features to take advantage of same-side network effects, or integration tools and boundary resources to facilitate third-party content creation. Guidance in the academic or practitioner literature is not granular. Moreover, relevant normative economic models that consider externalities are rarely dynamic. Hence, there is a gap in knowledge about how to best balance tradeoffs between different strategic decisions throughout the entire platform lifecycle. To begin to address this gap, we explore normative strategies for coordinating pricing and engineering investment decisions on a continuous basis under different ecosystem conditions. We build a simulation model informed by economics and marketing theory and perform extensive sensitivity analyses on key parameters in different ecosystem scenarios over a multi-period lifecycle. We find that pricing and investment strategies must continuously change to perform optimally. In particular, strategies that are most effective at launch often differ from those that are most effective during scaling as well as those most effective at maturity. We also find that the optimal strategy depends strongly on the monetization model and market aversion to price changes. Lastly, we specifically examine four different industry segments: mobile platforms, social media, the sharing economy, and business-to-business. The results provide evidence that the trajectory of platform pricing and investment strategies should greatly differ depending on industrial context.

摘要

多边平台必须就定价和工程投资做出决策，并且必须随着平台在其生命周期中的扩展而不断调整它们。工程投资可以分配到提高平台独立价值的功能、利用同边网络效应的社交功能、或促进第三方内容创建的集成工具和边界资源。学术或实践文献中的指导并不细致。此外，考虑外部性的相关规范经济模型很少是动态的。因此，关于如何在整个平台生命周期中最好地平衡不同战略决策之间的权衡，在知识上存在差距。为了开始解决这一差距，我们探索在不同生态系统条件下持续协调定价和工程投资决策的规范策略。我们建立了一个基于经济学和营销理论的模拟模型，并对多时期生命周期中不同生态系统场景的关键参数进行了广泛的敏感性分析。我们发现定价和投资策略必须不断改变才能发挥最佳效果。特别是，启动时最有效的策略通常不同于扩展期间最有效的策略以及成熟时最有效的策略。我们还发现，最优策略在很大程度上取决于货币化模型和市场对价格变化的厌恶程度。最后，我们具体研究了四个不同的行业领域：移动平台、社交媒体、共享经济、以及企业对企业。结果表明，平台定价和投资策略的轨迹应该根据行业背景而有很大差异。