The distinction between membership demand and demand for usage in platform competition is often ignored. Estelle Cantillon ECARES, Universite Libré de Bruxelles & Pai-Ling Yin, Sloan School of Management at MIT

Historical examples (ISDN, Teletex, telefax, telex) show us that forecasting efforts in thetelecommunication sector can go awry – not only by a few percentage points but by largemagnitudes. We maintain that with strong network effects it is not possible to forecast thesuccess of...