Online retailing provides alternative shopping channels, where the retail platform can either let manufacturers directly sell to consumers or open a self-operated channel, or even both. Regardless of sales channels, consumers often pay attention to the income gap between themselves and enterprises (named consumer's fairness concern). In this work, we explore how consumers’ fairness concerns affect the optimal decisions of both manufacturer and retail platform under different retail channel modes (single-channel mode and mixed-channel mode). The results show that consumer’s fairness concern has a negative impact on the retail price under low production cost in single-channel mode, while the retail prices in mix-channel mode are jointly determined by consumer’s fairness concern and revenue sharing ratio. Besides, if the market channel mode has not yet formed, the retail platform can choose either a self-operated channel or manufacturer consignment channel, depending on the consumer’s fairness concern level and revenue sharing ratio. By contrast, if the market channel mode has already been formed, the retail platform should make effort to reduce consumer’s fairness concern if only the self-operated channel exists, while maintain consumer’s fairness concern and revenue sharing ratio at a moderate level if there exist mixed channels.

This study examines platform competition in the presence of the same‐side network externality. We study the effects of same‐side network externality and agent information level on the competition. We find that if a platform possesses positive same‐side network externality and conceals adoption information, this can increase its profits and make itself the market leader. The uninformed agents make the opponent feel fewer threats from the positive same‐side network externality, so that it will not respond with aggressive competition. Furthermore, the information sharing decisions can be viewed as a coping strategy to the same‐side network externality.

Purpose This work aims to examine the quality disclosure strategy of sharing economy platforms with network externality, considering consumer risk aversion.Design/methodology/approach The game theory, sensitive analysis and numerical study are used herein. The equilibria are derived from the game theory. The quality disclosure strategy is analyzed by profit comparison. To further understand the characteristics of the optimal disclosure strategy, sensitive analysis and numerical studies are conducted to detail the analytical results.Findings Regardless of market structure, the quality disclosure decision problem is a trade-off between information effect and cost effect. Consumer risk aversion is a factor that can incentivize low-quality platforms to disclose quality. Both consumer risk aversion and network externality influence the quality disclosure strategy through information effect. Interestingly, for different competition intensities, consumer risk aversion and network externality could lead to positive or negative information effects of removing uncertainty. The authors show that under certain conditions, consumer risk aversion and network externality could induce more quality concealment.Research limitations/implications The quality is set exogenous herein, and the integrated process of quality investment and information disclosure is an interesting direction for future research.Practical implications This work provides managerial insights for sharing economy platforms regarding how to wisely consider consumer risk aversion and network externality when sharing quality information.Originality/value This work identifies two effects that determine quality disclosure strategy and specifies the role of each factor on quality disclosure.