Optimal strategies of social commerce platforms in the context of forwarding and bargaining

作者：Chen, Xu; Wu, Yingliang^*; Zhong, Rujie

来源：Operational Research, 2023, 23(2): 24.

DOI：10.1007/s12351-023-00768-8

• Social commerce platform
• Forwarding behaviour
• Game theory
• Traffic benefit
• Forwarding cost

"Forwarding and bargaining" is a new marketing pattern in social commerce that fully utilizes consumers' social relationships and offers an alternative for enterprises struggling with traditional e-commerce platforms. In this paper, we assume a Stackelberg game model between a social commerce platform and an e-commerce enterprise to investigate their strategy changes in four scenarios under the forwarding and bargaining context. Our results show that (1) platforms in the early-mid stage tend to adopt a subsidy strategy to obtain massive user and traffic benefits; (2) for enterprises operating high-quality but low-added-value products, it is unnecessary to join a developed social commerce platform; (3) platforms as direct beneficiaries can always gain more profits than can enterprises from increased traffic benefits; and (4) platforms desire to reduce the forwarding cost, whereas enterprises favour maintaining a higher one.