Leadership in Multi-sided Markets

I analyze the role of leadership in multi-sided markets as online advertising. Search and display advertising are better characterized by (respectively) quantity and price competition. A platform that reached dominance in search may have an incentive to limit services to consumers to be aggressive with the advertisers, to exploit its scale in search to build barriers to entry, or to adopt click-weighted auctions to manipulate the pricing of sponsored links. On the other side, a dominant platform in display advertising may increase the rewards of content providers to increase prices on advertisers, or may adopt exclusive clauses to predate on other platforms.