Information disclosure and pricing in the online expert service platform

The online expert service (OES) market is thriving by providing convenient professional services such as telemedicine consultation, legal advice, and financial planning. However, the practical phenomena, namely information asymmetry and the existence of naive consumers in the OES industry, motivate us to investigate how consumers’ two-dimensional heterogeneity and the expert’s agency pricing strategy with effort costs affect the OES platform’s information disclosure decision and corresponding market outcomes. By building a game-theoretic model, we consider the monopolistic OES platform in which the expert provides service to a mass of consumers, who can be either sophisticated or naive. The platform, as the designer of the disclosure framework, is thus an additional player in the seller-consumer game. Our results show that, when the marginal cost is intermediate, the platform strategically manipulates consumers’ valuation beliefs with partial disclosure to increase profitability without significant loss of market coverage. Furthermore, when naive consumers exist, the platform counter-intuitively discloses more information compared to that of all sophisticated consumers. Moreover, interestingly, when the marginal cost is low-to-intermediate, more naive consumers bring about more disclosure and thus obtain more demand for high-end sophisticated consumers, making both the expert and platform better off.