Abstract:The success of online retail platforms with hybrid reselling and agency selling has been well documented. Recently, manufacturers are expanding channels in competitive retail platforms(such as JingDong and Tmall) on the basis of reselling. Considering two asymmetric competitive retail platforms, we investigate the incentive for channel expansion under various strategies: agency selling in the incumbent platform, agency selling, or reselling in the asymmetric competing platform. Our analysis shows that the manufacturer’s channel expansion strategies depend on the market potential ratio, competition intensity, andagency channel costs. Manufacturers prefer channel expansion when agency channel costs are small or the market potential ratio is above a threshold. Interestingly, even the competing platform has a smaller market potential, manufacturers may still prefer to expand the agency selling channel in the competing platform rather than the incumbent platform. When the market potential ratio is large, under low agency channel costs, the impact of competition on channel expansion strategies is nonmonotonic, and moderate competition motivates manufacturers to expand the channel by reselling rather than agency selling in the competing platform. Furthermore, we find moderate slotting fee or commission rate could make manufacturers and the incumbent platform better off when the market potential ratio is small.

关键词：Agency selling, channel expansion, competition,reselling, retail platform.

该文2022年8月在线发表于《IEEETransactions on Engineering Management》，该期刊为FMS管理科学高质量国际期刊工程管理领域的A类期刊，也是武汉大学经济与管理学院学术期刊分级方案B+奖励期刊。杨茜为武汉大学经济与管理学院管理科学与工程系2020级在读博士生。