Hassle Costs Research Articles

Return strategies and channel pricing in omni-channel retail considering heterogeneous customer perceptions

As Internet technology advances, the retail industry is increasingly adopting omni-channel operational strategies. This research delves into the interplay between return losses and customer perceptions of online products, and how these factors influence profit-maximizing omnichannel retailers’ optimal return strategy and channel pricing. Previous studies have primarily focused on cross-channel aspects and have not thoroughly explored the impact of return loss on profitability in an omni-channel context. The study assumes that profit-maximizing retailers allow consumers to choose their purchase channels based on perceived utility of different channels, while adhering to the retailer’s stipulated return strategy. To this end, we introduce three distinct return strategies (returning products via the original purchase channel, offline return, and online return) for omni-channel retailers. We aim to identify the most profitable return strategy by considering diverse return losses associated with each channel and consumers’ perceptions of online products. Our analysis identifies scenarios in which a particular return strategy either boosts or reduces retailer profit, thereby facilitating optimal channel pricing decisions. Our findings reveal that customers’ purchasing channel selections are affected by their perception, retailer’s return strategy, and net return loss. We also find that no matter what kind of operation scenarios the retailers adopted, the retailers should let all customers return to the online channel to generate maximum profit when the difference between the retailer’s online and offline net return loss is less than the difference between the customer’s online and offline return hassle cost. Conversely, an offline return strategy proves more profitable. Our findings are supported by numerical simulations, guiding omni-channel retailers in making informed decisions regarding return strategies and channel pricing.

Managing physical inventory and return policies for omnichannel retailing

As the retail industry increasingly adopts an omnichannel strategy amidst the growth of e-commerce, this study explores the interplay between inventory and return policies in such a setting. Specifically, we focus on “return losses,” defined as the losses incurred by retailers due to customer product returns. We target how these return losses impact retailers’ profits and physical inventories. While previous research has mainly concentrated on cross-channel returns, little attention has been paid to how omnichannel return policies affect store inventory and profit. We posit that profit-maximizing retailers allow consumers to select their purchase channels based on utility but require returns to follow specific policies. In this paper, we model four return policies based on the channel of return: original purchasing channel return, offline return, online return, and cross-channel return. We use a newsvendor model to construct an optimal profit function that accounts for the additional profit from offline return, uncertainty demand, and inventory cost. Our analysis identifies the conditions under which certain return policies are beneficial or detrimental to omnichannel retailers. We discover that the retailer's product pricing, return losses, and consumer return hassle costs are the main factors influencing the best return policy and inventory policy decisions. Moreover, whether to increase or decrease store inventory and the relationship between physical inventory and return loss depend on the return policy, price, and return hassle cost. Numerical simulations support our findings, which offer practical guidance for omnichannel retailers aiming to optimize their inventory and return policies.

Hassle Costs versus Information: How Do Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs Reduce Opioid Prescribing?

We study hassle costs versus information provision in explaining how prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) decrease opioid prescribing. PDMPs aim to reduce opioid prescribing through information provision but may also unintentionally affect prescribing through the hassle of required record checks. We analyze Kentucky’s landmark PDMP to disentangle these two mechanisms. Hassle costs reduce opioid prescribing across the board, including to opioid-naïve patients; however, physicians continue to prescribe opioids to patients who would benefit the most. Although information also affects prescribing, hassle costs explain the majority of the decline. Introducing a cost to prescribing high-risk medications improves the targeting of treatment. (JEL H75, I11, I12, I18, L65)

Utilizing Consumer-Directed Care Among Older Adults: Identifying Barriers From Behavioral Economics Perspectives.

Consumer-directed Care (CDC) empowers older people to flexibly arrange services and enhances their well-being. Prior studies have suggested that limited attention and hassle costs are major demand-side barriers to using CDC. However, many other psychosocial factors were unexplored. In this study, we explore associations between CDC utilization and a wider range of psychosocial factors based on behavioral economics theories. A cross-sectional telephone survey of older persons (or family members that represent them) was conducted in Guangzhou, China in 2021. We adopted a two-stage sampling method based on administrative records and analyzed the data using multivariate logistic models. Procedural literacy, hassle costs, and social norms regarding CDC were associated with using CDC. The findings reveal nuances in the decision-making process, and people are not unboundedly rational in making care-related decisions. Policymakers could employ cost-effective tools to facilitate CDC utilization and optimize resources to address the most crucial service barriers.

Interaction between manufacturer's wholesale pricing and retailers' price‐matching guarantees

In practice, many retailers employ price‐matching guarantees (PMGs), committing to meet the price of an identical product at a competitor's outlet. Despite the profound linkage between retailers and manufacturers, existing literature has predominantly explored retailers' PMGs without contemplating the influence of manufacturers' wholesale pricing strategies. Employing a supply chain model comprising one manufacturer and two retailers, we scrutinize the implications of wholesale pricing—uniform or discriminatory—on supply chain members and consumers when retailers have the option to extend PMGs. Our analysis uncovers that retailers refrain from offering PMGs when the manufacturer is granted the discretion to set discriminatory wholesale prices—even if such offers align with the manufacturer's preferences. Conversely, under uniform wholesale pricing, PMGs thrive at equilibrium—even if the manufacturer opposes the practice—as long as the degree of demand or cost asymmetry between retailers and average hassle costs remains relatively modest. Although firms' preferences regarding PMGs vary, a Pareto zone exists where all entities prefer that either the efficient retailer under demand asymmetry or the inefficient retailer under cost asymmetry extends the PMG. Despite the potential advantages of PMGs for the more efficient retailer, the enforcement of uniform wholesale pricing diminishes supply chain profit, consumer welfare, and overall social welfare. The detrimental impacts on welfare owing to the imposition of uniform wholesale pricing persist, even amid the presence of hassle costs associated with price matching. Our findings thus instigate a dialogue for policymakers concerning the validity of regulating wholesale pricing when PMGs are in effect.

Behavior-Based pricing under asymmetric channel competition with strategic consumers

With behavior-based pricing (BBP), retailers use customers’ purchase records to price discriminate between new and past customers. In this paper, we investigate BBP in a setting where sales channels have different purchasing conveniences, indicating that channels are asymmetric. We examine how the adoption of BBP affects retailers’ profits, and how purchasing convenience, measured by the hassle cost in our model, affects retailers’ pricing decisions. To address these questions, we build up a three-period model in which two competing retailers with different hassle costs independently decide whether to adopt BBP, and sell repeatedly purchased products to strategic customers. By comparing retailers’ profits in different cases with different retailers adopting BBP, we find the conditions under which BBP can be profitable for retailers. In particular, the retailer with the higher hassle cost is more likely to benefit from the adoption of BBP. Therefore, contrary to intuition, retailers with high hassle costs do not always need to work on improving convenience when adopting BBP. Also, we find that retailers tend to make the same decision on whether or not to adopt BBP, and their decision depends on the hassle-cost gap between the two channels. Our findings provide guidance for retailers with different channel convenience on how to use BBP and respond to consumers’ strategic behavior in a competitive setting.

Manufacturer encroachment with an e‐commerce division

Traditionally, manufacturer encroachment is investigated under an integrated organizational structure where online business decisions are made at the whole firm level. However, with the establishment of a specific e‐commerce division, the manufacturer has the flexibility to delegate the decision‐making of the online business to its e‐commerce division to maximize the online revenue under a decentralized structure. We study manufacturer encroachment in a supply chain, where a manufacturer sells through a bricks‐and‐mortar retailer and plans to deploy its e‐commerce division to launch the online direct‐to‐consumer business. Different from prior research, we endogenize the manufacturer's choice between the integrated and the decentralized structures in its encroachment pursuit. Our results suggest that the decentralized structure could enlarge the manufacturer's feasible range to encroach, but it would also intensify the competition between the e‐commerce division and the retailer. Therefore, choosing the decentralized structure does not necessarily yield a higher profit for the manufacturer because the loss in the retail channel may be hard to offset due to the intensified competition. Instead, choosing the integrated structure could lead to a win–win–win outcome for the manufacturer, retailer, and e‐commerce division when the direct selling cost is sufficiently low. Although the manufacturer may benefit from encroachment under both organizational structures, it should not encroach when the direct selling cost is between low and moderate. Notably, the bright side of manufacturer encroachment's impact on the retailer still exists under the decentralized structure. We also study some alternative settings, including consumers’ offline hassle cost, market‐based transfer price, and quantity competition, to obtain additional insights.

Why Providing Return Policies for Probabilistic Selling

Probabilistic selling, whereby the exact identity of a product remains unknown until after purchase. The existing literature on probabilistic selling primarily focus on its attractiveness under the non-refundable condition. In this paper, we aim to study whether probabilistic selling integrated with return policies is still a lucrative marketing tool. This is an important new inquiry because of the prevalence of return policies in E-commerce platforms as well as heterogeneity in consumer preferences occurring in almost all markets. We develop a game-theoretic model to capture the fit uncertainty stemmed from online purchasing and the assignment uncertainty rooted in the stochastic assignment of probabilistic products. We characterize the seller’s optimal pricing and integrated strategies of probabilistic selling and return policies. We find the attractiveness of the probabilistic selling strategy and its return policies depends on the degree of the fit uncertainty and the assignment uncertainty. Counterintuitively, we find that sellers should decrease rather than increase the customer hassle cost of returns. The higher prices of component products are used as an additional lever to suppress customers' return of the probabilistic products. We demonstrate the integrated strategies of probabilistic selling with return policies, as a general marketing tool, can be more valuable than a separate one. The integrated strategies can create a win-win situation, improving both profit and consumer welfare.

Livestream e-commerce in a platform supply chain: A product-fit uncertainty reduction perspective

Livestream e-commerce involves broadcasters introducing, demonstrating, and selling goods while interacting with online audiences in real time via digital devices. In recent years, the livestream e-commerce industry has witnessed explosive growth. This paper establishes a stylised model of the livestream e-commerce supply chain and incorporates a salient feature of livestream selling, i.e., the livestream enables a reduction of the product-fit uncertainty for consumers. We obtain the optimal pricing decision for the seller and characterise the supply chain firms' profits when the platform's commission rate is exogenous. Two crucial parameters are identified in this scenario, i.e., the consumers' hassle cost to watch livestream and the seller's effective procurement cost. It is found that both the seller and platform prefer adopting livestream when the consumer's hassle cost is low and the effective procurement cost is high, and the seller has a stronger tendency to adopt livestream than the platform. We also investigate the problem under the endogenous platform's commission rate, revealing that the platform's optimal commission rate with livestreams should be higher than that without livestreams unless the consumer's hassle cost is considerably large and the seller's procurement cost is considerably small. Another result different from the scenario of the exogenous platform's commission rate is that a selling mode choice inconsistency occurs when the product's procurement cost and consumer's hassle cost are both very low, in which case, the platform prefers the seller to use livestream selling, whereas the seller prefers not to do so.

What Does a Provider Network Do? Evidence from Random Assignment in Medicaid Managed Care

Leveraging the random assignment of over 50,000 Medicaid enrollees in New York, I present causal evidence that narrower networks are a blunt instrument for reducing health care spending. While narrower networks constrain spending, they do so by generating hassle costs that reduce quantity, with modest effects on prices paid to providers. Enrollees assigned to narrower networks use fewer of both needed and unneeded services and are less satisfied with their plans. Using my causal estimates to construct counterfactuals, I identify an alternative assignment policy that reduces spending without harming satisfaction by matching consumers with narrower networks that include their providers. (JEL H51, H75, I13, I18, I38)

Digital Coupon Promotion and Inventory Strategies of Omnichannel Brands

This paper investigates when an omnichannel brand should offer digital coupons in the online and buy-online-and-pick-up-in-store (BOPS) channels and, if so, the joint decision of coupon face value and store inventory. The impact of a digital coupon promotion on store inventory is also explored. Two scenarios are considered, one where consumers’ costs in the online and store channels are homogeneous and another in which they are heterogeneous, and two newsvendor models, with and without a coupon promotion, are constructed under each scenario. The results show that the issuance of coupons improves the omnichannel brand’s profit when the price is high and the coefficient of the difference in valuation between two types of consumers is low in the homogeneous scenario. In the heterogeneous scenario, the brand prefers the coupon promotion when the price is high or moderate and the coefficient of the difference in valuation between two types of consumers is high. In addition, offering a coupon promotion yields a higher store inventory in most cases. However, store inventory is decreased in some special cases in the homogeneous scenario. Moreover, an increased hassle cost in the BOPS channel significantly lowers the offline demand and profit increase from a digital coupon promotion. Furthermore, a coupon promotion is more likely to benefit both the brand and consumers as the cross-selling revenue increases. These results provide guidance for omnichannel brands to implement coupon promotions and adjust store inventory with stochastic demand.

Integrating online and offline business of a retailer: A customer utility based inventory model

Looking at the digital transformation in the retail industry many bricks and mortar (B&M) retailers are interested to run their business in an integrated way. In that direction, our study analyses a joint online and offline retail business of a retailer. Here, a utility based approach has been proposed to reflect the customers’ choice behaviour over the available alternatives, where we have incorporated product availability factor along with product valuation, price and hassle cost, as the observed factors. Moreover, keeping in mind the unobserved factors we have proposed the logit model structure for the demand estimation of the two channels. Categorizing the product based on the valuation, our findings reveal that for products like electronic and home appliances, the retailer should give more priority to low-valued and moderately premium items for his/her joint online and offline business, whereas for items like books and games, such business strategy would be the preferred choice irrespective of product premiumness. Examining the customers’ price sensitivities towards the two shopping platforms, we find that when the online price sensitivity is lower than offline, customers are more intended to buy the premium category items online. On the other side, under higher online price sensitivity, initially, for lower valued items customers prefer to buy from B&M store but when the product belongs to the premium category, a balanced shopping behaviour among the customers is noticed. We have also discussed that customers’ hassle costs in different platforms have many strategical importance on the joint online and offline business.

Equilibrium queueing analysis in a ride-hailing service with sharing option

This paper examines different car-sharing models offered by ride-hailing firms. In the traditional model, customers are served individually. In the sharing-only model, all customers are willing to share the ride with other customers. In the hybrid model, customers may choose either individual or shared service provided by the same fleet. Sharing customers incur a hassle cost. We develop a queueing game-theoretic model to (i) determine the arrival rates that maximizes social welfare and (ii) choose admission fees that maximizes firm profits. First, we discover a tipping point in the hybrid model. When hassle cost decreases to this point, (i) the optimal customer behavior immediately switches from less than 80% sharing customers to 100%, (ii) the optimal arrival rate increases dramatically, and (iii) the rate at which a decreasing hassle cost improves the maximum social welfare significantly increases. Second, when hassle cost is higher than the tipping point, the hybrid model may generate higher social welfare than the other two models. Hence, the firm can improve social welfare by assigning customers to differentiated services even when they are not heterogeneous. Finally, we propose a profit-maximizing admission fee structure in the hybrid model to maximize firm profits and demonstrate its effectiveness.

Omnichannel retail operations with mixed fulfillment strategies

Many retailers are implementing omnichannel (OC) strategies including buy online, pick up in store (BOPS), buy online, ship from store (BOSS) and buy online, ship to store (STS). We study the impact of mixed fulfillment OC strategies (e.g., BOPS-STS, BOSS-BOPS-STS) on the retailer’s store operations. We build a stylized model where the retailer operates both a physical store and online channels, and faces two segments of customers: fixed-channel customers and OC-type customers. We find that both BOPS-STS and BOSS-BOPS-STS may induce customers to shift fulfillment options for time-insensitive or experience products when pickup hassle cost is low. In addition, both BOPS-STS and BOSS-BOPS-STS can expand the market for time-sensitive or experience products. We show that BOSS-BOPS-STS may increase the retailer’s optimal inventory level for time-sensitive or experience products when in-store hassle cost is high, and will decrease the optimal inventory level for time-insensitive or non-experience products when both pickup and in-store hassle costs are low. These two mixed strategies may increase or reduce the retailer’s profits, depending on whether they drive effects of option shift and market expansion and whether their fixed costs exceed certain thresholds. Finally, we find that different OC strategies interact and their effects on the retailer’s store operations and customers’ channel choices vary across product types.

Return insurance in a competitive market: Benefiting the high-quality or low-quality retailer?

Return shipping insurance (return insurance), as emerging insurance on many online platforms (e.g., Taobao.com and JD.com), develops rapidly in China over the past decade. Many retailers on the platforms purchase return insurance for consumers to reduce consumers’ hassle cost, while some retailers abandon return insurance. To investigate the retailers’ divergence on the adoption of the return insurance, we build a duopoly model in which two competing online retailers with different quality levels sell products to consumers who have uncertainty about their satisfaction. Both retailers can choose whether to purchase return insurance at different premiums. Our finding shows that as long as the increase in the consumers’ expected utility is higher than the cost of premium, the retailer is better off offering return insurance, independent of his competitor’s decision. Then, when the premium for the high-quality product is sufficiently low and the premium for the low-quality product is sufficiently high, the retailer with the high-quality product purchases return insurance for consumers and the retailer with the low-quality product abandons return insurance. Moreover, when both retailers offer return insurance, the retailer with the high-quality product may reduce or increase the retail price and the retailer with the low-quality product always increases the retail price. Finally, we examine the interaction between the retailers’ decisions on quality levels and the adoption of return insurance, and show that both retailers may improve quality levels when offering return insurance.

When Faster Online Delivery Backfires: Examining the Negative Consequences of Split Deliveries

ABSTRACT Online retailers assume that customers expect speedy delivery. To ensure that customers receive at least part of the order sooner, they often split deliveries into smaller quantities, spread out over different dates. Yet split deliveries may increase customers’ hassle costs, such that they have to receive multiple deliveries, as well as their perceptions of environmental harms due to more packaging and transportation. Three experiments and a field study test how delivery speed and split (vs. consolidated) deliveries affect key customer outcomes. In the case of split deliveries, faster delivery does not affect customers’ order completion, satisfaction, and word of mouth (Study 1); only when the deliveries are consolidated does faster delivery enhance them, and then only partially. Split deliveries also negatively affect the three outcomes more powerfully when the deliveries are fast (vs. slow) (Study 2). Study 3 reveals that the effects are mediated by perceived hassle costs and environmental impacts. Study 4, using apparel sales transaction data from a U.S. online retailer, shows that split (vs. consolidated) deliveries decrease the number of repeat purchases. These results carry important theoretical implications, as they show that delivery speed matters only under certain conditions and that rather the delivery mode (split vs. consolidated) may be a key unexplored factor associated with customer hassle costs and environmental concerns. The results are practically relevant because they suggest that retailers should not split deliveries to increase delivery speed; instead, shipments of multi-item orders should be consolidated to make receiving them hassle-free with environmentally friendly delivery in order to achieve positive customer outcomes.

Operational strategies for IoT-enabled Brick-and-Mortar retailers in a competitive market

Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been widely implemented in the retail industry to achieve sustainable operations; meanwhile, a number of operational concerns such as privacy and security have been exposed in practice. Therefore, more systematic theoretical analysis necessitates being performed in related fields. This paper explores how brick-and-mortar retailers can apply IoT technology to contend with online retailers and attract sustainable development. We first develop the pricing models for the online retailer and the brick-and-mortar retailer, respectively, by considering consumer hassle costs of purchasing in different retail channels and the impact of IoT technology. Further, we examine the benefits of IoT technology to the brick-and-mortar retailer and consumer surplus by comparing different cases. Afterward, to validate the robustness of analytical results from the basic models, we extend them to consider consumer risk aversion toward IoT technology and the price competition. Numerical analyses based on real data are also carried out. This study uncovers surprising findings and derives significant managerial insights. For example, we observe an opportunity that the IoT-enabled brick-and-mortar (IoT-B&M) retailer can regain lost market share from the competitive online retailers. Nevertheless, a higher level of personalized service supported by IoT is not necessarily beneficial to IoT-B&M retailers, which is contrary to our intuitions. Another counter-intuitive is that IoT-B&M retailers are unnecessary to improve service quality in the price competition, and they become challenging to profit when consumers are risk-averse.

Designing rewards‐based crowdfunding campaigns for strategic (but distracted) contributors

AbstractIn rewards‐based crowdfunding, entrepreneurs solicit donations from a large number of individual contributors. If total donations exceed a prespecified funding target, the entrepreneur distributes nonmonetary rewards to contributors; otherwise, their donations are refunded. We study how to design such campaigns when contributors choose not just whether to contribute, but also when to contribute. We show that strategic contribution behavior—when contributors intentionally delay until campaign success is likely—can arise from the combination of nonrefundable (potentially very small) hassle costs and the risk of campaign failure, and can explain pledging patterns commonly observed in crowdfunding. Furthermore, such delays do not hurt the entrepreneur if contributors are perfectly rational, but they do if contributors are distracted, that is, if they might fail to return to the campaign after an intentional delay. To mitigate this, we find that an entrepreneur can use a simple menu of rewards with a fixed number of units sold at a low price, and an unlimited number sold at a higher price; this segments contributors over time based on the information they observe upon arrival. We show that, despite its simplicity, such a menu performs well compared to a theoretically optimal menu consisting of an infinite number of different rewards and price levels under many conditions.

Effect of Integrating Access to a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Within the Electronic Health Record on the Frequency of Queries by Primary Care Clinicians

Tools that are directly integrated with the electronic health record (EHR) workflow can reduce the hassle cost of certain guideline-concordant practices, such as querying a prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) before prescribing opioids. To investigate the effect of integrating access to a PDMP within the EHR on the frequency of program queries by primary care clinicians. The PRINCE (Prescribing Interventions for Chronic Pain Using the Electronic Health Record) randomized trial used a factorial cluster design at the clinic level in 43 primary care clinics in Minnesota. In all, 309 clinicians participated; 161 clinicians were given EHR-integrated access to PDMP at the intervention clinics, and 148 clinicians had the usual access at the control clinics. The intervention went live on August 27, 2020, and data were collected through March 3, 2021. Single sign-on access to the Minnesota PDMP was integrated into the EHR, allowing clinicians to query a patient's controlled substance prescription and dispensing history as recorded in the Minnesota PDMP directly from the patient's EHR record without logging into a separate web portal. Additionally, the integration tool alerted clinicians and reminded them to review the PDMP if a patient had 3 or more opioid prescriptions in the past year and 1 or more in the past 6 months. Clinics in the control group did not receive access to the EHR-integrated PDMP tool; instead, these participants logged into the PDMP web portal separately. Monthly PDMP query counts for primary care clinicians, overall and by modality (EHR-based, web-based, via a clinical delegate), adjusted for clinician characteristics, including type (physician, nurse practitioner, physician assistant), sex, and years in practice. Data were analyzed from August 2021 to May 2022. Of the 43 participating clinics with 309 clinicians, 21 clinics with 161 clinicians (102 [63.4%] women; 114 [70.8%] physicians; tenure, 10.6 [4.4] years) received the PDMP integration intervention. Baseline unadjusted monthly PDMP query rates for the average clinician were 6.6 (95% CI, 4.4-9.9) vs 8.8 (95% CI, 6.0-13.1) queries in the control vs the PDMP integration group, respectively. During the intervention, PDMP query rates for the average clinician were 6.9 (95% CI, 4.7-10.3) vs 14.8 (95% CI, 10.0-22.0) queries among the control vs the PDMP integration group, respectively. Compared with the control group, the EHR-integrated PDMP tool produced a 60% greater increase in the relative change in monthly PDMP queries (95% CI, 51%-70%). An increase in PDMP queries via the EHR-integrated PDMP tool drove this increase, while web-based and delegate queries declined by 39% more among the intervention compared with the control group (95% CI, 34%-43%). This cluster randomized clinical trial found that integrating access to the PDMP in the EHR increased PDMP-querying rates, suggesting that direct access reduced hassle costs and can dramatically improve adherence to guideline-concordant care practices among primary care clinicians. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04601506.

Subsidize or Not: The Competition of Credit Card and Online Credit in Platform-based Supply Chain System

Credit purchasing has seen dramatic growth recently, stimulating online platforms to provide online credit services in competition with the credit card. We build a game-theoretical model to explore the platform's credit entry strategy when facing the credit card competition. Consumers differ in their credit card ownership and disposable personal incomes (DPI), and perceive a hassle cost of the credit purchase. We find that online credit offering brings an increased retail price. When the proportion of credit card ownership is high, the bank and platform subsidize consumers when the credit misfit cost is low, but charge an interest rate otherwise in an integrated system where the platform acts as a seller. However, the platform will never subsidize consumers in independent system where the retailer sells through the platform. The platform will enter the credit market only when the fixed entry cost is sufficiently low in integrated system, but only when the commission fee or misfit cost is large in independent system. When the proportion of credit card ownership is low, the platform will subsidize consumers when consumer dispersion in DPI is large or misfit cost is low. In addition, the platform has a high willingness to choose the entry strategy when the commission fee is large or misfit cost is low in independent case. Discussion and extension verify the robustness of basic model.