The two-sided analysis of platform businesses isn’t pro-defendant or pro-plaintiff. By accounting for business reality and modern economics, it helps courts and enforcement agencies reach the right decision and thereby reduce the likelihood of false negatives as well as false positives....

"Two-sided" markets have two different groups of customers that businesses have to get on board to succeed - there is a "chicken-and-egg" problem that needs to be solved. These industries range from dating clubs (men and women), to video game consoles (game developers and users), to credit cards...

This paper is about the regulation of bad behavior by participants on digital platforms. It shows that these platforms have private incentives to limit this bad behavior and, in fact, have rules, monitoring, and enforcement systems to do so. However, these private incentives may not provide...

This paper examines the contribution of 3G and 4G cellular technologies to the smartphone revolution. It relies on quasi-natural experiments in which these technologies were launched at different times and deployed at different rates across countries while the availability of handsets, operating...

: The Economics -- An Analysis of the Government’s Economic Case in U.S. v. Microsoft Corp -- Why Does Microsoft Charge So Little for Windows? -- U.S. v. Microsoft Corp.: Remedy or Malady? -- DOS Kapital: Has Antitrust Action Against Microsoft Created Value in the Computer Industry? -- The...

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...

In the wake of a series of court cases extending patents to software, open-source software proponents have proposed a number of arguments for limiting or even eliminating software patents. In particular, they claim that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has done a poor job of reviewing...

Payment methods have a high degree of inertia making change slow and challenging for new alternatives. So, it is not surprising that crypto currencies based on public blockchains are not broadly used 13 years after Bitcoin launched. The future of the largest public blockchains is limited,...

Decisions on how to regulate stablecoins, and other parts of the crypto industry, should be based on what we know about crypto’s past and present and discount starry-eyed forecasts of its future. The past demonstrates public blockchain cryptocurrencies are highly volatile; main blockchains have...