earticle

영어

Since the study of Parker and Van Alstyne, it has been widely accepted that the platform provider's subsidizing decision is dependent on the size of network spillover between both sides of the platform. However, an observation in this study shows significant differences between what we have expected and what it actually is. Our observation shows that the subsidizing decision is highly consistent within similar transaction cost structures, specifically asset specificity of the content provider or platform. Subsidy of the platform provider tends to move to the opposite way from specified asset while it moves towards distinctiveness of the transacted goods or services. To support the idea, this paper examines a number of real business cases mentioned in the previous literature. We classified asset specificity into 5 groups from 22 examples - 2 for subsidizing end-users, 2 for subsidizing upper stream providers, and 1 for not subsidizing.