This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292108000810">European Economic Review</A>.<p>We study a two-sided market where a platform attracts firms selling differentiated products and buyers interested in those products. In the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of the game, the platform fully...</p></a>

We study a two-sided market where a platform attracts firms selling differentiated products and buyers interested in those products. In the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of the game, the platform fully internalizes the network externalities present in the market and firms and consumers all...

The success of the Kindle e-book platform and the increased popularity of e-books among members of the reading community have attracted extensive interest in the high-tech industry. New platform providers are jumping in the market to compete for device and e-book sales. In this paper, we model...

This paper considers a model of district formation that incorporates a notion of regional industrial systems. Each firm chooses its location from the set of existing industrial districts. The heterogeneous firms are distinguished by its "stand alone" district-dependent production and...

Theories of multi-sided markets suggest that a platform’s pricing strategies on different sides of the market are closely linked, and in particular, an increase in competition on one side may lead to an increase in price on other sides. We empirically examine platforms’ pricing strategies by...

The externalities advertisers receive from newspaper readers and that operating system users receive from software developers are among the leading features of those “platform” industries. However, they are rarely incorporated into applied models of imperfect competition. We argue this...

Pricing of Internet access has been characterized by two properties. Parties are directly billed only by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) through which they connect to the Internet and the ISP charges them on the basis of the amount of information transmitted rather than its content. These...

We consider a heretofore unexplored explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers, might impose download limits on content consumers: doing so increases the degree to which those consumers view content providers’ products as substitutes. This, in turn, intensifies the...

We discuss the benefits of net neutrality regulation in the context of a two-sided market model in which platforms sell Internet access services to consumers and may set fees to content and applications providers “on the other side” of the Internet. When access is monopolized, we find that...

This paper investigates the price war in the UK quality newspaper industry in the 1990s. We build a model of the newspaper market which encompasses demand for differentiated products on both, the readers and advertisers side of the market, and profit maximization by four competing oligopolistic...