Platform businesses that facilitate connections between different stakeholders play an increasingly prominent role in the economy. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a seminal decision, Ohio et. al. v. American Express, on the analysis of antitrust issues involving these sorts of businesses....

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 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...

The new economics of multi-sided platforms involves a number of concepts that are familiar to economists as well as some new ones. This glossary, which is drawn from our book Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multi-sided Platforms, is an attempt to put together the main concepts and to provide...

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...