This Chapter provides a survey of the economics literature on multi-sided platforms with particular focus on competition policy issues, including market definition, mergers, monopolization, and coordinated behavior. It provides a survey of the general industrial organization theory of...

A surprising amount of debate leading up to the Supreme Court's decision in American Express, and the commentary following this landmark ruling, attempt to trivialize and marginalize the modern economic learning on multi-sided platforms. Despite these efforts the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and...

Times-Picayune, a 1953 Supreme Court decision involving newspapers, has gained notoriety from the Court's American Express decision concerning credit-card networks. The Amex dissent argued that the Court had already decided how to apply the rule-of-reason analysis to two-sided platforms in...

This paper shows that two related aspects of attention platforms are important for the sound economic analysis of public policy including antitrust: First, attention platforms generate valuable content. Even though people often don't pay for content, we know from revealed preference that content...

This paper is one of the major economic studies I submitted to the FCC in opposition to the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable. After reviewing and rebutting some of the economic theories and evidence put forth by Comcast in support of the merger the paper presents an antitrust...

The European Commission's proposed payments card legislation and the common position reached by the European Parliament in April 2014 will harm competition, innovation, and consumers if broadly endorsed by the European Council in the coming months. The interchange fee price caps will soften...

The SSNIP test and Critical Loss Analysis are widely used tools for determining market definition in merger and sometimes other antitrust matters. However, the standard techniques used to test for a relevant antitrust market are incorrect when the firms in question operate two-sided platforms....

A multi-sided platform (MSP) serves as an intermediary for two or more groups of customers who are linked by indirect network effects. Recent research has found that MSPs are significant in many industries and that some standard economic results - such as the Lerner Index - do not apply to them,...

“Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous...

The antitrust laws of the United States have, from their inception, allowed firms to acquire significant market power, to charge prices that reflect that market power, and to enjoy supra-competitive returns. This article shows that this policy, which was established by the U.S. Congress and...