Abstract: As retail platforms proliferate, the presence of agency selling and reselling in burgeoningretail platforms gives suppliers an incentive to match their product linesto sales channels. This study considers a supplier providing a product line ofquality-differentiated products in a retail platform. We aim to examine the equilibriumpricing in two mutually exclusive channel matching strategies: high-end(low-end) products are sold in an agency selling channel and low-end(high-end)products are sold in a reselling channel (termed channel matching strategies HL[LH]), and further analyze the impact of quality differentiation on the channel matchingstrategies and equilibrium outcomes. The results show that the impact of qualitydifferentiation on channel matching strategies is jointly moderated by the channelcompetition, the commission rate, and the product cost difference. If the channelcompetition is intensive and the commission rate is low, under small (large) productcost difference, quality differentiation motivates the supplier to select strategy HL(LH). Counter-intuitively, we show that improving the quality of high-end productsin a certain region at free of cost could make the supplier worse off when the productcost difference is sufficiently high. Interestingly, we find that when both the productcost difference and commission rate are small, the channel matching strategies canachieve a win-win-win situation for the supplier, the retail platform, and consumerssimultaneously under a moderate (low) level of quality differentiation and intensive(weak) channel competition.

关键词：agency selling, channel competition, channel matching, product line competition,quality differentiation, retail platform

该文2022年11月在线发表于《Naval Research Logistics》，该期刊为工业工程与物流管理旗舰期刊之一，也是武汉大学经济与管理学院学术期刊分级方案A-奖励期刊。柯剑男老师为本文的通讯作者，王明陆为武汉大学经济与管理学院管理科学与工程系2022届硕士毕业生。