Pricing and regulation in multi-sided markets : implications for payment card networks and smart metering

This thesis strives to offer new insights in two main areas. First, in the well-researched domain of payment cards chapters 2 and 3 investigate an aspect that has hitherto been scantly examined, namely, the fact that merchant usage fees differ substantially among merchant sectors. Additionally, if payment card networks are able to patronize certain sectors, which ones are they likely to pick? Second, chapter 4 identifies the smart (electricity) meter market as a multi-sided market and applies the insights found in the literature to better regulate a market-driven rollout of smart meters, the current objective in several countries and states, such as Germany. -- two-sided markets ; payment cards ; smart meter ; regulation ; platform pricing ; industrial organization