A Study on Pricing Mechanism of Community Service Platforms-On the Basis of Two-sided Market Theory

As a part of Chinese community informatization construction, community service platform (CSP) has the characteristic of public welfare. On the other hand, as an important node in the process of industrialization of community service, CSP undertakes the mission of introducing marketable mechanism. This article explores the pricing issues of CSP from the perspective of economics, based on the theory of two-sided markets. Our research shows that pricing with the purpose of optimal social welfare will produce a serious financial burden, which is not conducive to the long-term development of CSP. On the contrary, market-oriented operation is a valid guarantee for the continuing evolution of CSP; Indirect network externalities, user scale and the fixed cost for realizing the trading among users of both sides are three critical factors that affect the pricing of a platform; As an innovation of operating mechanism, CSP does user heterogeneous processing according to the price elasticity of demand of different service providers and takes the price discrimination strategy, which is beneficial for both profit maximization and social welfare optimization.