Oct 16, 2013   I’ve written the following articles on multi-sided platforms since the publication of Platform Economics: Essays on Multi-Sided Businesses in December 2011. Hopefully, you’ll find them useful. The first article, the “Antitrust Analysis of Multi-Sided Platforms,” provides a survey of the literature on multi-sided platforms that is relevant to competition policy through […]

David Evans, Sep 10, 2013   Last week a court appointed expert in the interchange fee litigation in the United States submitted a memorandum that evaluated the economic arguments presented by the plaintiffs and defendants. His memorandum highlights the importance of the new economic learning on two-sided platforms, and some of the questions courts will […]

David Evans, Aug 06, 2013   If you think there isn’t enough competition in the payments industry, just wait a few years – there will be a lot less in the U.S. and European Union. Before I explain why let’s take a survey of the state of competition. No, the payments card industry is not […]

David Evans, Mar 13, 2013   In the next several columns I am going to develop the argument that the economics profession now knows that many standard results do not in fact apply, at least not without modification, to businesses that are multisided platforms. This is based on a presentation that I will be giving […]

David Evans, Richard Schmalensee, Nov 13, 2012 This paper provides a brief progress report on market definition and the analysis of mergers for multi-sided platforms. It provides an update to an earlier article on multi-sided platform market definition. (For an overview of multi-sided platforms including the antitrust analysis of these platforms see Platform Economics.)

David Evans, Richard Schmalensee, Nov 13, 2012 Adapted from the Introduction and Conclusions to The Antitrust Analysis of Multi-Sided Platforms by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee, which is forthcoming in Roger Blair and Daniel Sokol, eds., Oxford Handbook on International Antitrust Economics, Oxford University Press. Since the birth of the multi-sided platform literature, three […]

David Evans, Feb 14, 2013   There’s an old saying that nothing’s certain but death and taxes. I want to add something else to the list. There are only 168 hours in a week. Everything you do from sleeping to working to watching television to eating and romance you need to do in those 168 […]

David Evans, Jan 08, 2013   The FTC’s 5-0 decision to drop its investigation into Google’s search-related practices is breathtaking. A number of companies had charged that Google was engaging in unfair competition by cooking its search results. Yet the Commission staff concluded that there was no significant evidence to support allegations that the “company […]