E-commerce platform response to major public emergencies-Optimal strategies and benefits of e-commerce platform subsidies

E-commerce platform plays an important role in Chinese economy and industrial structure transformation. Based on characterizations of operations and crisis subsideis of e-commerce platform, from the perspective of financial subsidies, we build a theoretical model to analyze the optimal strategies and benefits of e-commerce platform subsidies, in order to describe the differences and interactions among different platform subsidies. We find that:1) For single subsidy strategy, when the crisis is relatively serious, only the "blood transfusion" type strategy can help the retails, such as provision of loans; by contrast, when the crisis is relatively moderate, the "haemospasia" type strategy is more effective, such as exemotion or delay in collecting usage fees; 2) For the mixed subsidy strategies, the benefit of platform and the scale of crisis subsidies increase (decrease) with the degree of the severity of crisis when the platform has no (has) capital constraints; 3) Compraring to outside financial institutions such as banks, e-commerce platform is more efficient: Considering the symbiosis relationship, platform is willing to sacrifice short-term revenues in exchange for long-term income. Our study provides a framework to analyze strategies and benefits of e-commerce platform subsidies as well as a new perspective to understand how the e-commerce platform provide efficient financial subsidies due to the symbiosis relationship.