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Many online platforms adopt the ad-sponsored business model, which involves offering free services to consumers while collecting their data and selling targeted advertising space to advertisers. However, collecting consumer data has raised growing privacy concerns, which may affect consumers' homing behavior, i.e., using one platform (i.e., single homing) or multiple platforms (multihoming). This study develops a game-theoretic model to examine how consumer privacy concerns affect platform competition on the advertiser side by focusing on advertising prices, advertiser demand, and platform profits. Our model allows both consumers and advertisers to choose single homing or multihoming endogenously. Our results show that growing privacy concerns can allow platforms to increase their prices because higher privacy concerns can lead to more single homing consumers, who are of higher value to advertisers. Furthermore, we find that the impact of privacy concerns on advertiser demand and platform profits depends on the substitutability of platforms' targeting capabilities. Surprisingly, even when higher privacy concerns lead to fewer single homing consumers, platforms can attract more advertiser demand and achieve higher profits if they offer highly differentiated targeting options. Finally, we consider the case where platforms use exclusive contracts to lock in advertisers. Counter to the intuition that exclusive contracts tend to favor large platforms, we show that small platforms with lower targeting capability are more likely to benefit. We discuss relevant managerial and theoretical implications.
In this article, we construct a model to study competing payment networks, where networks offer differentiated products in terms of benefits to consumers and merchants. We study market equilibria for a variety of market structures: duopolistic competition and cartel, symmetric and asymmetric networks, and alternative assumptions about multihoming and consumer preferences. We find that competition unambiguously increases consumer and merchant welfare. We extend this analysis to competition among payment networks providing different payment instruments and find similar results.
Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but also the very nature of people's everyday lives. It is of vital importance that we understand the economic principles governing how these platforms operate. This book explains the driving forces behind any platform business with a focus on network effects. The authors use short case studies and real-world applications to explain key concepts such as how platforms manage network effects and which price and non-price strategies they choose. This self-contained text is the first to offer a systematic and formalized account of what platforms are and how they operate, concisely incorporating path-breaking insights in economics over the last twenty years.
Handbook of Industrial Organization Volume 4 highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters. Each chapter is written by an international board of authors. Part of the renowned Handbooks in Economics series Chapters are contributed by some of the leading experts in their fields A source, reference and teaching supplement for industrial organizations or industrial economists
A major result in the study of two-sided platforms is the strategic interdependence between the two sides of the same platform, leading to the implication that a platform can maximize its total profits by subsidizing one of its sides. We show that this result largely depends on assuming that at least one side of the market single-homes. As technology makes joining multiple platforms easier, we increasingly observe that participants on both sides of two-sided platforms multihome. The case of multi-homing on both sides is mostly ignored in the literature on competition between two-sided platforms. We help fill this gap by developing a model for platform competition in a differentiated setting (a Hoteling line), which is similar to other models in the literature but focuses on the case where at least some agents on each side multi-home. We show that when both sides in a platform market multi-home, the strategic interdependence between the two sides of the same platform will diminish or even disappear. Our analysis suggests that the common strategic advice to subsidize one side in order to maximize total profits may be limited or even incorrect when both sides multi-home, which is an important caveat given the increasing prevalence of multi-homing in platform markets.
This paper analyzes the effects of tying on market competition and social welfare in two-sided markets when economic agents can engage in multi-homing by participating in multiple platforms to reap maximal network benefits. The model shows that tying induces more consumers to multi-home and makes platform-specific exclusive content available to more consumers, which is beneficial to content providers. As a result, tying can be welfare-enhancing if multi-homing is allowed, even in cases where its welfare impacts are negative in the absence of multi-homing. The analysis thus can have important implications for recent antitrust cases in industries where multi-homing is prevalent.
Determinants of firm and market organization; Analysis of market behavior; Empirical methods and results; International issues and comparision; government intervention in the Marketplace.
With the rise of digital platforms and the natural tendency of markets involving platforms to become concentrated, competition authorities and courts are more frequently in a position to investigate and decide merger and abuse cases that involve platforms. This report provides guidance on how to define markets and on how to assess market power when dealing with two-sided platforms. DEFINITION Competition authorities and courts are well advised to uniformly use a multi-markets approach when defining markets in the context of two-sided platforms. The multi-markets approach is the more flexible instrument compared to the competing single-market approach that defines a single market for both sides of a platform, as the former naturally accounts for different substitution possibilities by the user groups on the two sides of the platform. While one might think of conditions under which a single-market approach could be feasible, the necessary conditions are so severe that it would only be applicable under rare circumstances. To fully appreciate business activities in platform markets from a competition law point of view, and to do justice to competition law’s purpose, which is to protect consumer welfare, the legal concept of a “market” should not be interpreted as requiring a price to be paid by one party to the other. It is not sufficient to consider the activities on the “unpaid side” of the platform only indirectly by way of including them in the competition law analysis of the “paid side” of the platform. Such an approach would exclude certain activities and ensuing positive or negative effects on consumer welfare altogether from the radar of competition law. Instead, competition practice should recognize straightforwardly that there can be “markets” for products offered free of charge, i.e. without monetary consideration by those who receive the product. ASSESSMENT The application of competition law often requires an assessment of market power. Using market shares as indicators of market power, in addition to all the difficulties in standard markets, raises further issues for two-sided platforms. When calculating revenue shares, the only reasonable option is to use the sum of revenues on all sides of the platform. Then, such shares should not be interpreted as market shares as they are aggregated over two interdependent markets. Large revenue shares appear to be a meaningful indicator of market power if all undertakings under consideration serve the same sides. However, they are often not meaningful if undertakings active in the relevant markets follow different business models. Given potentially strong cross-group external effects, market shares are less apt in the context of two-sided platforms to indicate market power (or the lack of it). Barriers to entry are at the core of persistent market power and, thus, the entrenchment of incumbent platforms. They deserve careful examination by competition authorities. Barriers to entry may arise due to users’ coordination failure in the presence of network effect. On two-sided platforms, users on both sides of the market have to coordinate their expectations. Barriers to entry are more likely to be present if an industry does not attract new users and if it does not undergo major technological change. Switching costs and network effects may go hand in hand: consumer switching costs sometimes depend on the number of platform users and, in this case, barriers to entry from consumer switching costs increase with platform size. Since market power is related to barriers to entry, the absence of entry attempts may be seen as an indication of market power. However, entry threats may arise from firms offering quite different services, as long as they provide a new home for users’ attention and needs.
We consider two-sided markets in which consumers and firms endogenously determine whether they single-home (patronize only one platform), or multi-home (join competing platforms). We find that the standard competitive bottleneck allocation in which all consumers single-home and all firms multi-home is always an equilibrium. In addition, we find allocations with a mix of multi-homing and single-homing on both sides of the market (akin to game consoles, ride- and home-sharing services, and video streaming platforms). However, unlike the standard pricing result where the side that multi-homes faces higher prices, we find that lower prices coincide with multi-homing: agents find multi-homing more attractive when faced with lower prices. We also show that endogenous homing induces a new platform pricing strategy, straddle pricing, which deters price undercutting between platforms.
A model of a two-sided market with two horizontally differentiated platforms and multihoming on one side is developed. In contrast to recent contributions, it is shown that platforms do not necessarily generate all revenues on the multihoming side by charging a higher price. Also, whether platforms' pricing structures favor exclusivity over multihoming is ambiguous.