This study was prepared by Andreas Kuhlmann, while he was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in September 2006 and was accepted as a Ph.D. thesis by the Economics Department of the University of Munich. The subject of this study is the analysis of network...

Digital platforms represent a new, potent disruptive force in incumbents’ businesses by transforming the way markets work and by altering the modalities by which incumbents’ offerings are delivered to and both accessed and consumed by customers. Digital platforms tend to disrupt in two basic...

This article provides an encyclopedic survey of the platform strategy literature and is organized around launch strategies, governance, and competition. A platform strategy is the mobilization of a networked business platform to expand into and operate in a given market. A business platform, in...

In this paper, I analyze the incentives of a monopolistic platform to open its infrastructure to an entrant on the buyer side of the market. If buyer and seller demands are linear and identical, and if the entrant operates on a separate market, I show that entry distorts the price structure in...

An increasingly common practice among media platforms is to provide premium content versions with fewer or even no ads. This practice leads to an intriguing question: how should ad-financed media price discriminate through versioning? I develop a two-sided media model and illustrate that price...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of cooperation on R&D investments in a two-sided market, where platforms compete in quantities. We show that if indirect externalities are of a moderate magnitude, the threshold degree of spillovers above which cooperation spurs R&D investments and enhances...

As technology and interconnectivity have continued to flourish, so too has an important and complex form of enterprise: the platform. Services like Uber, Google Search, Hulu, and American Express cater to distinct but deeply-interdependent “sides” of customers that derive value or revenues...

Strategic interactions between two-sided platforms depend not only on whether their decision variables are strategic complements or substitutes as for one-sided firms, but also - and crucially so - on whether or not the platforms subsidize one side of the market in equilibrium. For example, with...

We discuss network neutrality regulation of the Internet in the context of a two-sided market model. Platforms sell broadband Internet access services to residential consumers and may set fees to content and application providers on the Internet. When access is monopolized, cross-group...

In this paper, the author considers eight basic fallacies that can arise from using conventional wisdom from one-sided markets in two-sided market settings. These fallacies are illustrated using statements made in the context of regulatory investigations into credit card schemes in Australia and...