Platforms often use fee discrimination within their marketplace (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Uber specify a variety of merchant fees). To better understand the impact of marketplace fee discrimination, we develop a model that allows us to determine equilibrium fee and category decisions that depend...

Digital platforms are at the heart of online economic activity, connecting multi-sided markets of producers and consumers of various goods and services. Their market power, in combination with their privileged ecosystem position, raises concerns that they may engage in anti-competitive practices...

Digital platforms are at the heart of online economic activity, connecting multi-sided markets of producers and consumers of various goods and services. Their market power and their privileged ecosystem positions raise concerns that they may engage in anti-competitive practices that reduce...

Digital platforms operate in multisided markets providing services through the internet to two or more distinct groups of users, between which there are indirect network effects. Direct network effects are frequently present within each group. Therefore, online platforms usually present both...

This article presents and analyses the results of a large-scale empirical study in which over 11,000 consumers from ten countries in five continents were surveyed about their use, perceptions and understanding of online platform services. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first...

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) initiative, which is set to introduce ex ante regulatory rules for “gatekeepers” in online platform markets, is one of the most important pieces of legislation to emanate from Brussels in recent decades. It not only has the potential to...

In March 2020, the membership of the European Law Institute adopted the ELI Model Rules on Online Platforms. These Model Rules are the result of a 5-year project during which a multinational working group drafted and developed rules for the relationship between online platforms and their users....

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...

The power of today’s tech giants has prompted calls for changes in antitrust law and policy which, for decades, has been exceedingly permissive in merger enforcement and in constraining dominant firm conduct. Economically, the fear is that the largest digital platforms are so dominant and its...

This paper investigates the implications of vertical integration with private labels in the marketplace model opposed to the classic wholesale model. Differently from classic retailers, on a marketplace firms set end-consumer prices and the intermediary collects fees. When introducing a...