인터넷 산업에서 경쟁과 협조의 가격전략: 전자 상거래 시장의 후생효과

In the Electronic commerce market, network service, access service, and online informations service are combined to provide goods through the connection to the Internet. This paper provides a simple economic model to analyze competition and cooperation strategies among the firms in the Electronic commerce market, and gives some useful policy implications from the perspective of society. In particular, we compare the market equilibrium and the social welfare under the competition behaviors with the results which might be obtained under the cooperation behaviors. We show that network provider has an incentive to take strategic alliances with online service firm, which would increase the consumer surplus by reducing the total price. But, the strategic alliances would reduce the market share of offline firm and thus might decrease the social welfare if the network service cost, which occurs through online, is sufficiently larger than transaction cost, which occurs through transportation on offline. Furthermore, we show that not only the consumers surplus but also social welfare might decrease if the network provider leads the price competition to the online service firm.