Two-sided Markets and Screening Strategy

What best strategies do you intend to employ in your business or firm?

The 2017 post-graduate academic seminar was held in7^th November, 2017 at the School of Management, Jiangsu University.

The seminar was heavily attended by both Masters and PhD Students from the School of Management. The enthusiasm and the high level of participation from students showed how prepared they were to face the corporate and academic world through strategic management.

The seminar started at exactly 14:30 pm with an opening address from the dean ofSchool of Management. He further continued by introducing the lead presenter, A/Prof. Thomas Le Texier.

Thomas Le. Texier is an associate professor of Economics in university of Rennes 1, France. He is an expert in innovation and digital economics dealing with both managerial and market based aspects.

His presentation analyzed the extent to which a platform holder can benefit from investing in screening when there exists varying access to both consumers and content providers. The research first proposed a developed model in which a platform acts as an intermediary between consumers and content providers in a two-sided monopoly setting. Contents are provided at no charge to consumers but content providers generate revenues from third-party players (i.e., advertisers). The utility of consumers increases with the number of content providers and, conversely, content providers get higher revenues (i.e., advertising revenues) if they can attract more audience through the platform.

Complementary to traditional cross-group externalities, the research introduced two additional effects related to the ability of the platform’s holder to choose the level of screening (i.e., access quality).

The research noted that consumers value the access quality effort provided by the platform. On the other hand, quality increases the cost of content providers since the latter have to invest more to comply with quality requirements (e.g., quality standards) and cope with increasing complexity of the platform (i.e., integration cost).

A/Prof. Thomas Le. Texier admitted that though the two-side market screening is a new area of research, its impact on market analysis will play a major role in the development of new strategies for the growing demand of customers and market needs.

He pointed out that, growing companies like Taobao and Amazon would have to take some critical strategic measures toward the use of Two-sided Markets and Screening Strategy in other to keep in business and maintain customer satisfaction.

Participant expressed their joy and satisfaction to A/Prof. Texier for his presentation and the exposure of this new area of research.