时间：4月11日（周五）上午10:00     地点：345教室（取决于具体预约情况）

讲座题目：Platform Recommendation Algorithms, Niche Market Entry, and Quality Competition              

讲座内容：As e-commerce platforms increasingly rely on recommendation algorithms to help consumers navigate a vast selection of products, regulation is often required to ensure fairness in algorithm recommendation and market competition. However, changes in recommendation algorithms aimed at improving market fairness and consumer welfare may also have unintended consequences on product variety and quality. We examine Amazon’s binding commitment to comply with the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA’s) regulation, which prohibits Amazon from using Prime eligibility as a criterion for recommending the Featured Offer within a product market and its impacts on market outcomes. We find that, after the CMA’s regulation, Amazon UK reduced the percentage of Prime-eligible offers in the default featured offers compared to before. Such an algorithmic change increases product-level total click. However, the markets’ product diversities decline, combined with worsened ancillary service qualities from the featured offers, leading to reduced consumer purchases and lower average product ratings. Mechanism analysis at the seller level reveals that the decline in product diversity is potentially due to sellers diverging in their responses to the algorithm change, with some concentrating their product portfolio more on core product markets and others shifting to long-tail product markets. Our findings provide implications for platform governance and optimizing regulation policies to promote competition fairness and enhance consumer welfare.

主讲人简介：

Xia Han is an Associate Professor (Non-tenured) at Business for Science and Technology, School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China. She earned her Ph.D. degree in strategic management from the National School of Development, Peking University. Her research interests include corporate strategy and platform strategy. She has published papers in Foreign Economics and Management, the Chinese Journal of Management, and AOM’s best paper proceedings. Her research papers have been accepted by and presented at the Annual Conference of the AOM, SMS, IACMR, POMS, and INFORMS. Her research papers received multiple awards and nominations, including the finalists for the SMS Best Conference Paper Prize 2021, the finalist for the TIM Best Paper Award at the Academy of Management 2023, nominee for the Best PhD Paper Prize and the Research Methods Paper Prize at the Strategic Management Society 2023, the finalist for the SMS’ Competitive Strategy IG Best Proposal Award for Rigor, and the winner of the Best Paper Award in E-Business at the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2023. She is an anonymous reviewer of the Journal of International Business Studies, Management and Organization Review, AOM, SMS, IACMR, and ICIS conferences.