A Study of the Flywheel Effect of Platform Membership System
Membership systems can play the role of screening and locking users in the traditional economy,but in the platform economy,membership systems can further generate the flywheel effect,which is a kind of virtuous circle mecha-nism to promote the rapid development of platform enterprises.Although this effect has been deeply recognized and fully utilized by the industry,the existing literature on the platform economy and the membership economy has not yet made a theoretical analysis of the mechanism of the flywheel effect generated by the platform membership.This paper innova-tively proposes that the mechanism of the flywheel effect generated by the platform membership system is a mechanism of attention attraction and traffic distribution,which attracts users'attention with the help of member services,aggregates them into traffic resources and then distributes them to merchants within the platform,while the merchants convert the traffic resources into sales of commodities with the help of the dual membership system,thus forming a benign interac-tion between the traffic market and the commodity market.In order to portray this mechanism,this paper introduces the concepts of transaction utility and time allocation deci-sion of consumers,thus constructing a multi-agent dynamic game model including platform enterprises,merchants and consumers.The main findings are as follows:when the consumer income level increases,the platform user structure is op-timized,or the scale effect of member services increases,the platform enterprise will improve the quality of member ser-vices to augment transaction utility for members and consumers.This fosters increased attention,subsequently improving the quantity and quality of the platform's traffic resources.In other words,it increases the traffic conversion rate,which incentivizes merchants to pay a higher price for purchasing traffic resources and screen consumers for promotion with the help of the membership system to increase its own revenue from merchandise sales,and at the same time,increase the traffic business revenue of the platform enterprise.Consequently,this will motivate the platform enterprise to further im-prove the quality of member services,forming a new round of virtuous circle,and thus generating the flywheel effect.We also find that there are factors limiting the flywheel effect:when consumer income level declines,platform user size in-creases without structural improvement,and the natural traffic from merchants increases.The first two factors reduce the traffic conversion rate,which in turn reduces merchants'demand for public domain traffic,while the third factor directly reduces merchants'traffic demand.The three factors lead to a decline in traffic prices and revenue for platform enter-prises,consequently impacting the quality of member services.As a result,not only does it restrict the distribution of traf-fic on the platform but also hampers traffic acquisition,thereby impeding the effectiveness of the flywheel effect.A case study of the JD PLUS membership system supports the above key findings.Compared with the existing literature,the theoretical contributions of this paper are twofold:on the one hand,this pa-per proposes a new type of role of membership system in the platform economy,i.e.,user's attention attraction and traffic distribution,which makes up for the lack of membership system related literature;on the other hand,this paper incorpo-rates the consumer's attention allocation decision and the merchant's traffic purchasing decision into the analysis of the platform economy at the same time,and elaborates that the platform membership system can produce flywheel effect by establishing the transformation mechanism of traffic market and commodity market,highlighting the operational charac-teristics of the platform economy as the traffic economy,and making up for the lack of the platform economy theory on at-tention and traffic decision-making.This paper provides important insights for promoting the high-quality development of the platform economy:platform enterprises should prioritize enhancing the platform user structure rather than solely fo-cusing on scale expansion,by fully utilizing the platform membership system.Additionally,integrating various types of platform enterprises can effectively construct and operate a traffic market,leveraging traffic resources to benefit both mer-chants on the platform and offline physical stores.This approach helps shape a digital ecology that facilitates the fusion of online and offline economies.Regulators should take the operation of the platform membership system as an important el-ement of regularized supervision,and guide platform enterprises to better promote consumption and serve the real economy on the basis of safeguarding consumer interests and market order.
万方数据
维普
