How to charge doctors and price medicines in a two-sided online healthcare platform with network externalities?

Jianbin Li, Fangying Hu, Tingting Yan, Xueyuan Cai and Xiangrong Song

International Journal of Production Research, 2023, vol. 61, issue 9, 3051-3069

Abstract: Platform business models are upending the value proposition of the companies in traditional industries, such as healthcare, through competitively pricing value-added services and products. In this study, we consider a unique, but important, on-demand two-sided service platform: a monopolistic online healthcare platform, which not only provides medical services to patients by connecting them with doctors, but also sells medical products to patients. A crucial operational decision for the platform is to set up a pricing scheme to encourage enough doctors and patients to participate on the platform. We consider two common pricing schemes in this study: fixed and linear pricing, in an empirically-grounded optimisation model that considers medicine pricing decisions together with network externalities. Our results show that the fixed pricing scheme almost always dominates the linear pricing scheme by providing the platform with higher expected profit. Our results also reveal the strong interdependence between the optimal doctor service pricing decision and optimal medicine pricing decision. However, these decisions are often made independently by different functional units of a firm, which could cause suboptimal platform financial performance. These results indicate the importance of pricing products and services in an integrated manner for maximising the profit of a product/service platform.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2022.2077151

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