Abstract:

Based on the characteristics of third-party electronic market in China, a two-sided market competition pricing model was builded to analyze and explain the pricing problems faced by the market. The results imply the complementary relationships between the optimal lump-sum fee and per-transaction fee paid by users of one side in a platform, and also between the total fees paid by users of two sides in the same platform. For different platforms, the total user fees are positive correlated each other. The optimal lump-sum fee is declining and the optimal per-transaction fee is increasing as the total fee charged by competitive platform is increasing. Platform will set a higher per-transaction fee and a lower lump-sum fee if the matching technology is advanced or the consumer's expected transaction frequency is declined, and vice versa. Based on the equilibrium analysis, the pricing problems of China's C2C（Customer-to-Customer）and online P2P（Peer-to-Peer）market are analyzed and explained.

Key words: two-sided market；the third-party electronic market；pricing