Recent claims that online platforms have secured permanent monopolies, protected by barriers to entry from network effects and stockpiles of data, and should be the focus of intense antitrust and regulatory scrutiny, are inconsistent with the economics, technology, and history of online...

Many online businesses, including most of the largest platforms, seek and provide attention. These online attention rivals provide products and features to obtain the attention of consumers and sell some of that attention, through other products and services, to merchants, developers and others...

This paper studies asymmetric platforms' incentives for enforcing exclusivity on multihoming sellers. We show that exclusivity benefits a platform only when its service is not very valuable to sellers, and hence can be initiated by a weak platform rather than the stronger one. It is possible for...

Platforms play an essential role in the modern economy. At the same time, algorithms are becoming more widely used for pricing and other business functions. Previous literature examined algorithmic pricing, but not in the context of network effects and platforms. Moreover, platform competition...

We study the effects of competition and interoperabilty in platform markets. To do so, we adopt an approach of competition in net fees, which is well-suited to situations where users pay additional charges, after joining, for on-platform interactions. Compared to other approaches, net fees...

We analyze platform competition where user data is collected to improve ad-targeting. Considering that users incur privacy costs, we show that the equilibrium level of data provision is distorted and can be inefficiently high or low: if overall competition is weak or if targeting benefits are...

Market power on each side of a multisided platform, whether in the form of increasing prices or decreasing quality, is constrained by the risk of losing sales on the other sides. That tends to weaken market power on each side and encourages platforms to keep prices lower and quality higher than...

Recent advances in machine learning have reinforced the competitive position of leading online platforms. This Essay identifies two important sources of platform rivalry and proposes ways to maximize their competitive potential under existing antitrust law. A nascent competitor is a threatening...

Digital platforms, empowered by artificial intelligence algorithms, facilitate efficient interactions between consumers and merchants that allow the collection of profiling information which drives innovation and welfare. Private incentives, however, lead to information asymmetries resulting in...

Firms in traditional markets often compete in output à la Cournot. In this paper, we consider Cournot competition between platforms in a two-sided market. We find that the markup and markdown terms are distorted toward zero for greater levels of platform competition and for greater levels of...