Customer behavior and adoption · Exploratory analysis of seller sales data plus a duopoly/sequential-game model explaining the observed pattern.
Can Third-Party Sellers Benefit from a Platform’s Entry to the Market?
Yiting Deng, Christopher S. Tang, Wei Wang, Onesun Steve Yoo (2023). Can Third-Party Sellers Benefit from a Platform’s Entry to the Market?. Service Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2023.0324.
Plain-English take
After entry, similar third-party sellers charged higher prices, obtained higher demand and earned higher profit; the proposed explanation requires moderate platform potential and sufficient spillover. For your marketing: Use it as a behavioral mechanism or experiment-design reference, not a direct forecast for a SaaS funnel.
How much weight to give this
3/5 Moderate evidence for a specific setting
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
Exploratory analysis of seller sales data plus a duopoly/sequential-game model explaining the observed pattern.
JD.com sales data for one product category in March 2018; third-party sellers before/after platform entry.
Judged from the publisher-described design and comparison; consult the paper for complete analysis.
Publisher page and abstract were retrieved directly; full text was not assumed open.
Double-blind? Blinding was not established from the retrieved publisher record.
Research question
What the authors investigated
Can platform entry benefit incumbent third-party sellers rather than harm them?
Design
Exploratory analysis of seller sales data plus a duopoly/sequential-game model explaining the observed pattern.
Sample and setting
JD.com sales data for one product category in March 2018; third-party sellers before/after platform entry.
Reported result
What the study found
After entry, similar third-party sellers charged higher prices, obtained higher demand and earned higher profit; the proposed explanation requires moderate platform potential and sufficient spillover.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The empirical analysis is one product category and one month on JD.com and is explicitly exploratory; the theoretical explanation is conditional rather than causal proof across settings.
Possible founder application
Use it as a behavioral mechanism or experiment-design reference, not a direct forecast for a SaaS funnel.
Evidence access
Publisher record and abstract retrieved; consult the linked paper for full methods and tables.
Publisher abstract specifies the single-category March-2018 JD.com data and reports higher price, demand and profit after entry. Direct publisher-page retrieval was recorded on 2026-10-09; this profile uses publisher metadata/abstract and does not claim independent review of unavailable full text.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.