Abstract: As a new business model to improve consumers’ presale experience sinking presale is attracting the attention of many e-commerce companies. More and more e-commerce companies adopt sinking presale mode since 2019.On the other hand, consumer structure affects the e-commerce companies’ decision-making. Therefore, is the sinking presale mode is a better choice for asymmetric e-commerce platforms in presence of bounded rational consumers? Can the asymmetric e-commerce platforms win the competition by adopting differentiated presale strategy? How the consumer structure affect the asymmetric e-commerce platforms’ strategy choosing? In this paper, the Hotelling model is utilized to construct the duopoly market and four scenarios are analyzed: (1)Both of the asymmetric e-commerce platforms adopt regular presale mode, (2)the e-commerce platform with better logistic service adopts regular presale mode while the other one adopts sinking presale mode, (3)the e-commerce platform with better logistic service adopts sinking presale mode while the other one adopts regular presale mode, and (4)Both of the asymmetric e-commerce platforms adopt sinking presale mode. After deducing the optimal pricing of the asymmetric e-commerce platforms under different competition scenarios, the decision results are compared and the Nash equilibria are obtained. The study shows that (1) only when the proportion of bounded rational consumers in the market is below a certain threshold, two logistics service asymmetric e-commerce platforms will adopt the sinking presale mode simultaneously. (2) When the proportion of bounded rational consumers is higher than a certain threshold, the two logistics service asymmetric e-merchants will still adopt the general presale mode simultaneously. (3) When the proportion of bounded rational consumers is moderate, if the e-commerce platform with logistics service advantage in the general presale mode decides to maintain the logistics service advantage in the sinking presale mode, it will eventually not adopt the sinking presale mode, and its competitors will adopt the sinking presale mode to compete with it; if the e-commerce platform without logistics service advantage in the general presale mode decides to choose better logistics service than its competitor in the sinking presale mode, its competitors will adopt the sink pre-sale model, while this e-commerce platform can only compete with it by adopting the general presale mode. In addition, this paper also analyzes the impact of the product delivery time of the e-commerce platform with logistics service advantage in the general presale mode and the proportion of bounded rational consumers on the decision outcomes of the two e- commerce platforms, and obtains the comparisons between the decision outcomes of the two e-commerce platforms in the four different presale competition scenarios under different conditions.

Key words: Presale, Sinking Presale, Competition, Bounded Rationality