社群網站二維競爭模型

Abstract

社群網站最近成長相當快速，也吸引到大量的使用者。通常，使用者不只使用單一的社群網路，而會使用多個社群網路，並將他（她）的資源（如時間、精神）按一定的比重分配到這些社群網路上。和傳統的商品或服務相比，社群網路的使用者幾乎沒有轉移成本。就我們所知，現在並沒有任何一個分析模型，利用使用者使用社群網路的方式，來建構社群網路的競爭模型。因此，在本篇論文中，我們利用品質與網路外部性建構一個權重式選擇模型，以分析兩個社群網站的競爭策略。分析結果顯示權重式選擇將鼓勵社群網站在品質方面互相競爭，因為在品質方面每一分的投資，都可以獲得報酬。當社群網站的使用者品質意識增加時，社群網站的競爭亦會加劇，因此，兩個社群網站的獲利會比沒有品質競爭的情形差。同時，我們亦根據不同的參數設定分析不同的競爭情境。本研究的分析結果可提昇我們對於社群網站的商業模式與競爭策略的了解。

Social network sites (SNSs) have grown dramatically and attracted a tremendous number of users recently. Users may choose more than one SNSs and decide how much resource (e.g. usually finite for each user, such as time and energy) they want to spend on each SNS rather than choosing just one SNS that provides more satisfaction or utility than others. Also, SNSs users have low switching costs in comparison to traditional products or services since they can try different services without paying anything to service providers. To the best of our knowledge, there is no analytical model dedicated on studying SNSs’ competition strategy in a way that users experience SNSs. Therefore, in this thesis, we use quality and network externality to construct a weighted choice model to analyze the competition between two SNSs. The results show that weighted choices encourage SNSs to compete in quality since each unit of quality investment gets payoffs. The competition between SNSs becomes more intense when quality awareness of both SNSs increases. Thus, both SNSs earn less profit in comparison to the case of no competition in quality. For different parameter settings, the optimal strategies are offered in these competition cases. The analytical results can help improve our understanding of business model and competition strategy for SNSs.