Content-hosting platforms: discovery, membership, or both?

时间：4月20日（周四）10:30 a.m.-12:00

地点：经院302教室

主讲人：Tat-How Teh（香港中文大学（深圳）助理教授）

主持老师：吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；胡岠（国发院）

参与老师：胡涛，吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；汪浩，胡岠（国发院）；翁翕（光华）

摘要：We develop a model that classifies platforms in the "creator economy"--- e.g., Youtube, Patreon, and Twitch---into three broad business models: pure discovery mode (providing recommendations to help consumers search for creators); pure membership mode (enabling individual creators to monetize their viewers through direct transactions); and a hybrid mode which combines both. Creators respond to platforms' decisions by individually choosing to supply content designed along a broad-niche spectrum, which involves a trade-off between viewership size and per-viewer revenue. These design changes create a trade-off between the platform's advertising revenue and transaction commission revenue. In a monopoly platform benchmark, moving from pure discovery to hybrid always increases platform revenue while making content weakly more niche. However, moving from pure membership to hybrid may reduce platform revenue if providing advertising is not sufficiently lucrative. In a duopoly setup, these tradeoffs can change substantially depending on the level of platform competition and homing behavior of creators and consumers.

主讲人介绍：Tat-How Teh joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) as an assistant professor in economics in September 2021. His research interests are platform economics, consumer search, industrial organization theory, and, more generally, applied microeconomic theory. He has published articles in several leading economic journals, including RAND Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, and Games and Economic Behavior. His works have received the Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards (academic articles) in 2023. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the National University of Singapore in 2019.