Marketplace scalability and strategic use of platform investment

The scalability of a marketplace depends on the operations of the marketplace platform as well as its sellers' cost structures and capacities. When fixed costs of entry are high, sellers with small capacities may be deterred from entering the market because of their inability to leverage economies of scale. In this study, we explore one strategy that a marketplace platform can use to enhance its scalability: providing an ancillary service to sellers to reduce their fixed costs. In our model, a platform can choose whether and when to provide this service to sellers. When the platform provides the service, it encourages the entry of small sellers. However, it diminishes large sellers' incentives to make their own investment, thus reducing their potential output. When the output reduction by the large sellers is substantial, the platform may not want to provide the ancillary service even if it could do so at no cost. To encourage entry while mitigating output reduction, the platform may choose to strategically delay providing the service