Abstract
The past decade has witnessed various industries being disrupted by the platform business. Nowadays, platforms are ubiquitous and they reach almost every aspect of our life, such as food (Doordash), mobility (Uber), entertainment (Netflix), and travel (Airbnb). The growth and survival of platform business largely depends on their ability to choose a proper monetization strategy. To tackle this challenge, Bocconi University and University of Bologna will collaborate on four projects to provide a holistic view on platform monetization. 1 THE DIGITALIZATION OF A PLATFORM-BASED ECOSYSTEM. We leverage the publishing industry as a context to study the emergence and evolution of the platform ecosystems, and how choices around monetization affect such dynamics. We will focus on these questions: how do platform ecosystems emerge and evolve? How does the platform monetization impact the governance of platform ecosystems? What implications can be derived on how to manage the platform business model? A longitudinal study of the digital publishing ecosystem will be performed using a mix of archival and primary sources (i.e., interviews) to derive qualitative depth through a comparative analysis. 2 PLATFORM MONETIZATION STRATEGIES ON SUPPLY AND DEMAND SIDES. How did the monetization policy change impact the supply concentration and the product diversity of a platform? Does it impact how the users on the demand side find products match them? To answer these, we leverage a natural experiment on Goodreads to examine consequences of monetizing a popular promotional program run by the platform: Goodreads Giveaways. Participating in this program was free for authors and publishers till January 2018, after which Goodreads enacted a policy change and began to charge a fixed participation fee. We collect large-scale data to analyze both the supply and demand sides response to this monetization policy. 3 TARGETED ADVERTISING IN SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS. We investigate social media platforms that face a strategic tradeoff when addressing the needs of different participants: while content providers would like to reach as many users as possible, users are not always interested in the content and may suffer a disutility from advertising. How to create value for and thus attract participants from both sides? Using a formal model, this project aims to examine a platform that offers targeted advertising to increase the “click-through rate” while minimizing users’ disutility from advertising. 4 OPTIMAL PLATFORM PRICING STRATEGY CONSIDERING USER WAITING TIME. We investigate the optimal platform pricing strategy Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca MUR - BANDO 2022 considering markets where users on both sides might experience wait times, such as in the case of Uber. We introduce a two-states Markov chain (Leon-Garcia 2008) to model the users’ two states, and investigate the optimal strategy for a platform. We compare a platform that optimizes its pricing strategy on one side only vs. a platform that optimizes on both sides.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Leonardo Corbo
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Scienze Aziendali
Coordinator:
Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi MILANO(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 93.100,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
28/09/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
