Many diverse industries are populated by businesses that operate two-sided platforms. These businesses serve distinct groups of customers who need each other in some way, and the core business of the two-sided platform is to provide a common (real or virtual) meeting place and to facilitate...

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...

Two-sided platforms (2SPs) cater to two or more distinct groups of customers, facilitating value-creating interactions between them. The village market and the village matchmaker were 2SPs; eBay and Match.com are more recent examples. Other examples include payment card systems, magazines,...

This paper provides an introduction to the economics of two-sided platforms (2SPs) and its application to competition policy issues. 2SPs cater to two or more distinct groups of customers. Members of one customer group need members of the other group for a variety of reasons that we explore. The...

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...

This volume collects a series of essays that I have written over the last decade on multi-sided platform businesses that create value by providing products that enable two or more different types of customers to get together, find each other, and exchange value. Part I presents background pieces...

It is currently fashionable to argue that certain “network” industries—like telephones in the old days or various internet platforms today—are subject to market power because of “network effects”: lock-in by early movers. However, recent history belies that; Facebook displaced...