We model platform competition in a market where products are characterized by cross network externalities. Consumers differ in their valuation of these externalities. Although the exogenous set-up is entirely symmetric, we show that platform competition induces a vertical differentiation...

We explore a variant of the Hotelling model which allows to nest horizontal and vertical differentiation into a unified setup whose key parameter is the relative natural market size of the firms. In this setup, equilibrium prices increase whenever population's disparity decreases. We also...