Nowadays, some online retailing platforms emerge to integrate transport capacity to provide standard distribution service for sellers. Such an integrated form of service is defined as delivery alliance (DA). To have a better understanding of how to price the service, this study aims to fixate on the seller’s problems and builds a series of profit maximization models in accordance with the two-sided market pricing theory within a platform business model.,In the present study, some optimization models are built in the two-sided market type and the optimal solutions are found in a three-dimensional decision space. By using the basic model as the benchmark, some optimization problems of DA in realistic situations are discussed. Particularly, a power-law-distribution model is established to deal with the uncertainty in forecasting. Also, a price-sensitive model and a loss-aversion model are presented to describe the various reactions of sellers to charging modes. Finally, some combined situations are discussed and the strategies are compared under the mentioned models.,By selecting the basic model as the benchmark, the specific pricing strategies are found for each context to yield the optimal profits. The flexibility of pricing strategy in the basic model and rigid pricing strategies in extended models, are discussed. As a result, the guidelines for the online retailing platforms are developed on designing and pricing the DA service.,First, it would be interesting to expand the pricing plan of the platform. For instance, menu pricing and quantity discount have not been considered, which are common in practice. The time discounting has also been ignored. If the time value were calculated, the contract fees would be more critical due to the earliest of collecting money. Finally, those joiners who have huge order sizes are crucial for the ecosystem indeed, but arouse no attention. While in reality, they may have more power to bargain with the platform. Thus, how the platform competition affects the pricing strategies needs future research.,The optimal pricing strategies under these models are analytically found out, and it is shown that the presented models result in the same scale of joiners and profits in optimization. This suggests that DA works well in various behavioral contexts. This also suggests that DA is a significant controller in service quality improvement. Then, the optimal pricing strategies are compared among all the models. During this, it is discovered that the realistic contexts might reduce the profit, whereas an appropriate pricing strategy can pull this back without loss of service quality.

中文翻译：

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在线零售平台中交付联盟的最优定价策略

如今，一些在线零售平台应运而生，以整合运输能力以为卖家提供标准的配送服务。这种集成的服务形式被定义为交付联盟（DA）。为了更好地了解如何对服务进行定价，本研究旨在解决卖方的问题，并根据平台业务模型中的双向市场定价理论建立一系列利润最大化模型。 ，则在双向市场类型中构建了一些优化模型，并在三维决策空间中找到了最优解决方案。以基本模型为基准，讨论了实际情况下DA的一些优化问题。特别是建立了幂律分布模型来处理预测中的不确定性。还，提出了价格敏感模型和损失厌恶模型来描述卖方对收费模式的各种反应。最后，讨论了一些组合情况，并在上述模型下对策略进行了比较。通过选择基本模型作为基准，针对每种情况找到了特定的定价策略以产生最佳利润。讨论了基本模型中定价策略的灵活性和扩展模型中的刚性定价策略。结果，在线零售平台的指南是在设计和定价DA服务的基础上制定的。首先，扩展平台的定价计划将很有趣。例如，没有考虑菜单定价和数量折扣，这在实践中很常见。时间折扣也被忽略了。如果计算时间值，则由于最早收钱，合同费用将更为关键。最后，那些拥有巨大订单规模的加入者对于生态系统确实至关重要，但不会引起人们的注意。实际上，他们可能拥有更多与平台讨价还价的能力。因此，平台竞争如何影响定价策略有待于未来研究。通过分析发现这些模型下的最优定价策略，表明所提出的模型在优化过程中产生了同等规模的参与者和利润。这表明DA在各种行为情况下都可以很好地发挥作用。这也表明DA是改善服务质量的重要控制者。然后，在所有模型之间比较最优定价策略。在这，