Strategy to Regulate Online Knowledge Market: An Analytical Approach to Pricing

Abstract

This chapter studies different levels of pricing strategies for an online knowledge market, where consumers ask and experts answer questions to make knowledge transactions. Consumers optimally price their questions to obtain answers and a firm manages the online knowledge market by determining the optimal price allocation to experts. This research identifies two types of consumers, spin-off and mainstream, depending on whether additional utilities will be derived from the market. In addition, we investigate how the firm can use minimal and maximal posting prices to regulate the knowledge market.