Relying on the rapid development of information and internet technologies, e-commerce has boomed over the past decade. As a link between manufacturers and consumers, the e-commerce platform has a crucial position in the online retailing market. The e-commerce platform not only provides an online marketplace through which the manufacturers directly sell products to consumers but also purchases and resells manufacturers’ products to consumers. Therefore, when the e-commerce platform provides services to manufacturers, it is faced with the selection of two sales methods: reselling or marketplace. Using a game theoretic model, we focus on the strategic interactions between an e-commerce platform and two brand manufacturers in four different business modes. The results show that the e-commerce platform profits more when both brand manufacturers directly sell products through the online marketplace. From the two brand manufacturers’ points of view, using the e-commerce platform as a reseller is always more profitable than directly selling, no matter which business mode they are in. The above findings have important implications for the selling decisions of the e-commerce platform and brand manufacturers. Furthermore, an interesting and counterintuitive result is that the new brand manufacturer benefits more than the existing brand manufacturer when consumers’ acceptance of the new brand products is becoming lower. When production costs are low, only the two brand manufacturers can achieve a mutually beneficial situation by selling products to the e-commerce platform. Moreover, the competition among brand manufacturers is beneficial to the e-commerce platform. Our research provides a theoretical basis for brand manufacturers and the e-commerce platform to make more rational decisions, and it updates the existing knowledge about brand competition and e-commerce platform’s business mode choices.

Artificial intelligence-powered recommendation systems have gained popularity as a tool to enhance user experience and boost sales. Platforms often need to make decisions about which seller to recommend and the strength of the recommendation when conducting recommendations. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the recommendation strategy of the platform in the case of duopoly competition. We develop a game model where two competing manufacturers sell products through an agency contract on a common platform, and they can decide whether or not to provide recommendations to the manufacturers. Our highlight lies in the endogenous recommendation strength of the platform. The findings suggest that it is optimal for the platform to offer recommendation services when the commission rate is high. The platform also prefers to only recommend one manufacturer in the market with low or high competition, but it prefers to recommend both manufacturers in moderately competitive markets. From the view of manufacturers, they can benefit from the recommendation service as long as the commission rate is not too low. Moreover, recommending only one manufacturer consistently yields stronger recommendations compared to recommending multiple manufacturers. However, the impact of recommendation on prices is influenced by the commission rate and product substitutability. These results have significant implications for platform decision making and provide valuable insights into the trade-offs involved in the development of recommendation systems.

Fairness issues have been frequently mentioned in the business world. In the context of today's global e-platform economy, this is more likely to breed fairness concerns due to the inherent power differential between e-platforms and third-party sellers (3P sellers). This article focuses on the impact of fairness concerns and power structures on the performance of supply chain members. In this article, we develop a game-theoretic model consisting of e-platform and 3P seller. The results of this article show that different power structures have different influences on the existence of fairness concerns. When the power structure tends to be balanced, the emergence of fairness concerns reduces the total efficiency of the supply chain system. When the e-platform is in a strong position, the emergence of fairness concerns has no effect on the supply chain system. It is also found that although the fairness concerns of the 3P seller cannot positively affect the supply chain as a whole, for the 3P seller itself, the emergence of fairness concerns can realize the transfer of profit distribution from the e-platform to the 3P seller by resetting the commission. In addition to the contribution of the theoretical part, some management insights are gained in this article. Supply chain members need to pay attention to the relationship management among supply chain members (e.g., fairness concern psychology). From the perspective of resource allocation, fairness and efficiency sometimes cannot coexist, and the stability of the supply chain and overall high efficiency sometimes cannot coexist.