This article provides an overview of the competitive issues surrounding online platforms. The general theme is that while much has been made of the structural features of online platforms there is little hard evidence that these are durable monopolies. Nonetheless, there are concerns about the...

Recent claims that online platforms have secured permanent monopolies, protected by barriers to entry from network effects and stockpiles of data, and should be the focus of intense antitrust and regulatory scrutiny, are inconsistent with the economics, technology, and history of online...

Should the FTC have allowed Zillow to acquire its foremost rival, Trulia? It is increasingly well-accepted that digital platforms tend toward dominance in their immediately adjacent relevant-product markets. Google, for example, has long held a majority share of the markets for general-search...

Switching costs and network effects bind customers to vendors if products are incompatible, locking customers or even markets in to early choices. Lock-in hinders customers from changing suppliers in response to (predictable or unpredictable) changes in efficiency, and gives vendors lucrative ex...

Technology platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, are the hubs of technology industries. We develop a framework to characterize the optimal two-sided pricing strategy of a platform firm, that is, the pricing strategy towards the direct users of the platform as well as towards firms offering...

The paper explores the analogy between city and two-sided market. It generalizes the results on the pricing strategies of the platform in the two-sided markets for the case when concentration spillover plays an important role. The two-sided market framework is applied to model a city. The paper...

Digital platforms frequently refer their users to competitors. We show that these references induce a business-sharing effect that may relax competition for users, resulting in lower quality of content. More surprisingly, user surplus may also decrease as the quality effect may overwhelm the...

We study how digital platforms can choose competitive strategies to influence the number of multihoming consumers. Platforms compete for consumers and advertisers. A platform earns a premium from advertising to singlehomers, as it is a gatekeeper to these consumers. Competitive strategies...

In light of recent trends in social networking services that encourage users of platforms to “share,” “recommend,” and “do activities” with others, this work analyzes platform competition in two-sided markets that exhibit direct (or within-) network effect in addition to conventional...

This chapter focuses on the economic mechanisms at work in recent models of advertising finance in media markets developed around the concept of two-sided markets. The objective is to highlight new and original insights from this approach, and to clarify the conceptual aspects. The chapter first...