Online platforms, such as Google, Facebook, or Amazon, are constantly expanding their activities, while increasing the overlap in their service offering. In this paper, we study the scope and overlap of online platforms' activities, when they are endogenously determined. We model an expansion...

This paper explores the incentives for, and the effects of, collusion in prices between two-sided platforms. We characterize the most profitable sustainable agreement when platforms collude on both sides of the market and when they collude on a single side of the market. Under two-sided...

We examine the profitability and welfare implications of targeted price discrimination in two-sided markets. First, we show that equilibrium discriminatory prices exhibit novel features relative to discriminatory prices in one-sided models and uniform prices in two-sided models. Second, we...

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...

We study a two-sided market in which a platform connects consumers and sellers, and signs private contracts with sellers. We compare this situation with a two-sided market with public contracts. We find that the platform provider sets positive (negative) royalties to sellers and earns a negative...

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...

We empirically study a dynamic platform competition in the online daily deals promotion industry characterized by intense rivalry between two leading promotion sites, Groupon and LivingSocial, that broker between local merchants and local consumers. We find that, for a comparable deal, the...

Many products sold on online platforms have additional features. Platforms can deliberately shroud these features from consumers, e.g. by revealing them only late in the purchase process. For example, platforms often reveal shipping- and handling fees, or upgrades like luggage or hotel services...

This paper investigates the importance of network effects in the demand for ethanol-compatible vehicles and the supply of ethanol fuel retailers. An indirect network effect, or positive feedback loop, arises in this context due to spatially-dependent complementarities in the availability of...

This paper studies a “market creating” firm that offers a matching environment, by charging an access fee, to a population of users who wish to form a match. We focus on an environment where users only observe a signal from their randomly assigned partner's type and the signal...