Offensive pricing strategies for online platforms

Pricing strategy is important to a platform not only for branding but also for capturing the willingness-to-pay of customers. With keen competition, few platforms survive to reach the growth and maturity stages. This study examines offensive pricing strategies in a pure duopoly where two platforms have products with high dependency. We also examine how the effectiveness of message dissemination, simulated by WOM marketing, affects offensive pricing strategies in the platform business. We developed a multi-agent model to simulate pricing strategies and message dissemination.