经济学院2023年数字经济系列讲座（十六）

讲座题目： Online Relational Contract and Offline Investment

主讲嘉宾：陆卓然 助理教授 （复旦大学）

讲座时间：2023年10月19日（周四）上午10：30开始

讲座地点：华中科技大学经济学院402室

主办单位：华中科技大学经济学院、华中科技大学创新发展研究中心

内容提要：Online sellers often face the holdup problem that the platform can create knockoff products to compete against them, and thus, have lower incentives to invest in product innovation. In contrast to the existing literature, this paper explores the possibility of using informal and long-term governance structure to solve such conflicts. In particular, we consider relational contracts between platforms and sellers. We show that the enforceability and efficiency of the relational contract depends critically on the seller’s outside option, product depreciation and market structure. Specifically, the seller’s outside option has discontinuous and non-monotonic effects on the efficiency of relational contract, suggesting that higher outside option such as higher offline market value may not benefit sellers. Moreover, the sustainability of relational contract is generally nonincreasing in the product depreciation factor, with the exception that an increase in the factor may discretely increase the contract sustainability by delaying the transition to the fallback. Finally, an increase in market competition can reduce the sustainability of relational contract since it makes the fallback relatively attractive. Our paper thus sheds light on the potential advantage of informal platform governance and has meaningful implications for platform economy.

中文摘要：

在线卖家经常面临这样的问题：平台可以创造山寨产品来与他们竞争，因此投资于产品创新的动力较低。与现有文献相反，本文探讨了利用非正式的长期治理结构来解决此类冲突的可能性。我们特别考虑平台和卖家之间的关系合同。我们表明，关系合同的可执行性和效率主要取决于卖方的外部选择、产品折旧和市场结构。具体而言，卖方的外部期权对关系契约的效率具有不连续和非单调的影响，这表明较高的外部期权（例如较高的线下市场价值）可能不会使卖方受益。此外，关系合同的可持续性通常不会随着产品折旧系数的增加而增加，除非该系数的增加可能会通过延迟向回退的过渡而离散地增加合同的可持续性。最后，市场竞争的加剧会降低关系契约的可持续性，因为它使回退相对有吸引力。因此，我们的论文揭示了非正式平台治理的潜在优势，并对平台经济产生了有意义的影响。

讲座嘉宾简介：

陆卓然，复旦大学管理学院助理教授。他从清华大学获得学士学位，从UCLA获得博士学位。他的研究涵盖了契约理论，信息经济学，网络经济学和产业组织理论。他的研究得到了国家自然科学基金支持。