Software platforms are a critical component of the computer systems underpinning leading? edge products ranging from third? generation mobile phones to video games. After describing some key economic features of computer systems and software platforms, the paper presents case studies of personal...

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...

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...

Online advertising accounts for almost 9 percent of all advertising in the United States. This share is expected to increase as more media is consumed over the Internet and as more advertisers shift spending to online technologies. The expansion of Internet-based advertising is transforming the...

This article examines antitrust analysis when one of the possible subject products of an antitrust or merger is ordinarily offered at a zero price. It shows that businesses often offer a product for free because it increases the overall profits they can earn from selling the free product and a...

There is now a professional consensus among economists that multisided platforms are the main form of business organization in many industries; that these platforms face interdependent demand from multiple groups of customers; and that profit-maximization in the face of this interdependent...

The two-sided analysis of platform businesses isn’t pro-defendant or pro-plaintiff. By accounting for business reality and modern economics, it helps courts and enforcement agencies reach the right decision and thereby reduce the likelihood of false negatives as well as false positives....

Based on the publicly available information on the data sources and methodology used by the Census Bureau to estimate e-commerce and physical retail sales, and based on detailed e-mail communications with the Census official responsible for the retail trade data, we found, in a version of this...

The Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, in the course of considering mergers and acquisitions as well as other policy matters, have conducted detailed investigations of the wired broadband business, and the intertwined business of providing linear programming....

Though network effects are important for multisided platforms, the simple winner-take-all notion that they always give larger platforms an insurmountable advantage over smaller rivals has been disproven by numerous counterexamples. It is now being argued that big data is power, so that a firm...