Abstract: With the vigorous development of e-commerce, platform retailing is rapidly emerging, such as Amazon and Jingdong. More and more brands enter online retail platforms in the marketplace model (i.e., commission model), while platforms provide services for brands to broaden market demand. In the online retail environment, advertising investment is the most important way for e-commerce platform sellers to attract consumers. Online platforms use platforms' superior resources to push multi-channel advertising according to brands' advertising needs, and charge brands the corresponding level of advertising service fees. Therefore, brands who reside in the platform can purchase multi-channel advertising push services to increase the market competitiveness. In addition, in the era of e-commerce, many retail giants (e.g. Jingdong, Walmart, etc.) hold the dominant power in the supply chain system, while the power of brands is often asymmetrical. Based on the above background, this paper considers that two brands with asymmetric decision-making power consign two alternative products through the same retail platform, and studies the advertising investment and price game strategy of the brands under the platform's dominance and the decisions on advertising service pricing and consignment revenue sharing ratios for the retail platform. The literature about asymmetric power competition mainly focuses on price competition, but it does not consider the decision of advertising service level. As a more and more important product advertising service in business practice, it not only affects consumers' purchase choices, but also stimulates market demand. Under the asymmetric decision-making power structure, this paper studies the advertising service level decision-making and product pricing decision-making, which is of certain theoretical significance and practical value.
This paper constructs Stackelberg game model dominated by a retail platform and Stackelberg game model of two asymmetric brands. Decisions of the retail platform and the two brands are divided into three stages: In the first stage, the retail platform first decides the revenue sharing ratio of the unit product and the unit advertising service fee charged to the two brands. In the second stage, the leading brand decides its retail price and advertising level. In the third stage, after observing the decision of the retail platform and rival brand, the follower decides its retail price and advertising level. In this paper, we use exponential demand function to describe the market size of the two brands and obtain the refined Nash equilibrium solution by backward induction method. And the research results are analyzed by analytical method and example analysis method.
The study shows that, the advertising investment and price competition strategies of the two brands are affected by the first-mover advantage and cost advantage. The high-cost leading brand chooses the low advertising investment and low retail price strategy, while the follower chooses the high investment and high retail price strategy. The low-cost leading brand chooses the strategy of high advertising investment and low retail prices, while the follower chooses the strategy of low advertising investment and high retail prices. In addition, the increase in the elasticity coefficient of advertising service and cross price elasticity coefficient will intensify the competition of brand owners in price and advertising service level, and the retail platform will reduce the unit advertising service fee to attract more advertising investment from manufacturers and increase the proportion of revenue sharing. However, when the price elasticity coefficient increases, the retail platform will take the opposite strategy.

Key words: platform retailing, advertising service, consignment, asymmetric power, pricing

摘要： 随着电子商务的蓬勃发展,越来越多的品牌商入驻在线零售平台,并购买平台的多渠道广告推送服务。考虑两个不对称决策权力的品牌商通过同一零售平台寄售两种替代性产品,研究了平台主导下品牌商的广告投入和价格竞争博弈策略以及零售平台的广告服务定价和寄售收益共享比例决策。研究发现,两品牌商的广告投入和价格竞争策略受到先动优势和成本优势的双重影响:高成本主导品牌商选择低广告投入、低零售价格策略,而跟随者投入更多广告、设置更高零售价格;低成本主导品牌商会采取高广告投入、低零售价格策略,而跟随者会采用低广告投入、高零售价格策略。此外,广告服务弹性系数的增加和交叉价格弹性系数的增加会加剧品牌商的价格和广告服务水平竞争,而零售平台则降低单位广告服务津贴吸引品牌商更多的广告投入,同时增加收益共享比例,但是当自身价格弹性系数增加时,零售平台会采取相反的策略。

关键词: 平台零售, 广告服务, 寄售, 不对称权力, 定价