Abstract: |
Digital platforms, such as e-commerce and peer-to-peer sharing platforms, often take an active role in assisting sellers with product descriptions, pricing, quality checks, and selling processes. While this platform participation benefits direct adopters, its impact on nonadopters, the entire platform, and the long-term impact on adopters remains unclear. We address this gap by examining a natural experiment in which a platform launched a platform-participated submarket to assist sellers. We find that the platform participation improves adopters' sales performance and listing behaviors. It also has a long-lasting effect beyond the platform-participated market as adopters learn from the platform practices and adjust their future behaviors. Interestingly, nonadopters experience a U-shaped effect: they are negatively impacted when the adoption rate is low but benefit when the adoption rate is high. Platform-level analyses reveal a similar nonlinear relationship: with a low adoption rate, platform-wide sales performance drops and sales concentration increases, while a higher adoption rate leads to improved overall sales performance and decreased sales concentration. Regardless of the adoption rate, both the platform and buyers benefit from improved listing behaviors among adopters and nonadopters alike. These findings have important implications for platform designers and policymakers concerned about the anticompetitive effects of platform participation.
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Biography:
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Qiaowei Shen is Professor of Marketing and Changjiang Scholar at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. Her research interests include empirical modeling of firm and consumer decision making, social interactions and new media, and competitive marketing strategy. Her research has been published in top academic journals such as Marketing Science and Management Science and has been nominated for the John Little Award Finalist in Marketing by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). She is a recipient of 2017 Excellent Young Scholar awarded by the National Science Foundation of China. Professor Shen currently serves on the editorial boards of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing and International Journal of Marketing Research. Prior to joining Peking University, she was a faculty at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Professor Shen received her Ph.D. in marketing from UC Berkeley and her M.A. and B.A. in Economics from Peking University.
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