No abstract

This study considers a market comprising two suppliers and one e‐commerce platform. The two competitive suppliers sell products to consumers through the platform. The platform can choose three selling modes: reseller, market, and mixed. Additionally, we consider two referral strategies—namely, exclusive and nonexclusive recommendations—and build a three‐party Stackelberg game model. Per the findings, the difference in the players' decision‐making results exhibits an essential relationship with the recommendation market's initial size. A counterintuitive result is that the product price is not affected by the commission rate in the market mode. This provides referential insights for platforms and suppliers.

This article considers e-commerce platforms with and without promotion, builds biform game models consisting of one and two supplier platforms, and calculates the profit distribution of the three parties using the Shapley value method. The optimal strategies of the three parties are discussed, including which platform the supplier will choose to cooperate with and which logistics service strategy to choose. In addition, how platforms make their commission rates to attract suppliers and which promotion strategy to choose are also studied. The results show that regardless of whether the platform promotes sales or not, in the case of charging consumers for the shipping fee when the standard shipping fee of unit product is low, the supplier will choose to cooperate with the platform without self-built logistics and use the third-party logistics to deliver products. When the standard shipping fee is high, the supplier will choose to cooperate with the platform with self-built logistics. But in the case of free shipping for consumers, the conclusion is just the opposite.