Dual channel oligopoly pricing strategy of posted-price opaque sale based on the spokes model

Opaque sale is a novel sales strategies for selling excess inventories and is appeared with the rapid development of Internet and E-commerce. The paper focus on the posted-price (PP) opaque mechanism, under which two oligopoly competition models are set up, one is about single direct selling channel, the other concludes double channels (direct channel and the opaque sales channel). The equilibrium price and equilibrium profit is obtained and the equilibrium conditions are given. We find that when the valuation of leisure consumers is relatively high, sell from double channels can effectively increase providers' equilibrium profit. However, at the same time, we also find that, with the increase of leisure consumers' valuation, for resellers which running the PP opaque channel, their profit increases firstly and then decreases, which completely different to the providers'. Moreover, resellers' revenue becomes negative when leisure consumers' valuation is very low. Thus, when leisure consumers' valuation is very low or very high, the resellers are not suitable to cooperate with opaque goods providers. Especially, when the providers' inventory is very high, while leisure customers' valuation is low, signing cooperation agreement with service providers is not cost-effective for the opaque resellers. Theoretical references can be provided for the pricing in competitive electronic commerce environment.