Pricing Mechanism under Inter-industry Platform Cooperation——Analysis Based on the Effect of the Cooperation on Intrinsic Benefit

Taking the trend of more and more inter-industry platform cooperation as background,the paper analyzes the effect of the cooperation on pricing in two-sided markets.Based on a duopoly competition model considering the fact that inter-industry platform cooperation improves users' intrinsic benefit,we find that as the intrinsic benefit of users on cooperation platform increases,this platform increases the price of users on the side generating weaker network externalities.But on the price of users on the other side,the result depends on the difference of network externalities between two user groups of the platform.About the symmetry of pricing on the cooperation platform,we find that inter-industry platform cooperation aggravates the asymmetry of pricing on users of the two sides.And the conclusions are completely reverse on the non-cooperation platform.The paper also indicates that inter-industry platform cooperation may improve the profit of the cooperation platform,and enhance the consumers' surplus and welfare of the whole society.This brings an important implication to the regulatory agency that it should be paid more and more attention to public polices on cooperation in two-sided market to avoid excessive interference.