Two-Sided Markets

New eBook on Two-Sided Markets Now Available, Gratis to our Community

The area of two-sided markets is one of the hottest in economics and especially pertinent to the field of antitrust. In fact, the first academic paper on the subject (by William Baxter in 1983) was inspired by a study of the antitrust issues involving credit card interchange fees. Jean-Charles Rochet & Jean Tirole pursued this lead, eventually coining the term “two-sided markets.” Over the years, we’ve discovered that one of the problems with two-sided market analysis is that it is hard to find formal limiting principles (not uncommon in economics). Sometimes a two-sided market perspective is highly informative while other times it isn’t. It matters when it matters. What’s now very clear, with the benefit of a decade of work, is that the study of multi-sided platforms has provided valuable insights to economists, policymakers, and business people.
Download the eBook Essays on Two-Sided Markets
To bring our readers up to date on two-sided market studies, we’re presenting three collections. The first is a collection of papers by David S. Evans presented in an easily downloadable eBook format, Essays on the Economics of Two-Sided Markets.*  Part I presents background pieces on the economics of multi-sided platforms and industries in which these platforms are common. Part II examines the antitrust economics of two-sided markets including the difficult problem of defining the boundaries of competition. Part III comprises several papers that apply two-sided market analysis to web-based businesses. Part IV does the same for payment cards which is the industry that attracted much of the early two-sided analysis-in part because this framework was helpful for understanding the hotly debated issue of interchange fees. Part V collects several article and book chapters on software platforms. These platforms have become especially important in the last several years because they are now the basis for revolutionary developments with mobile devices (e.g. the iPhone and Android), social networking (Facebook in particular), and payments (PayPalX). The essays are published as originally written. To download, click on the book cover or here (no payment required).

The second collection are articles printed in the CPI Antitrust Chronicle over the last few years; these articles are accessible individually in the left column on this page.

And finally, we’re making available a viewing of a class taught by Professors David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, authors of Catalyst Code, called It Takes Two to Tango: Competition Analysis of Two-Sided Markets.

*This eBook and its content is copyright of the publisher, Competition Policy International Inc.  – © Competition Policy International, Inc. (2010). You may download copies of all or part of the content of this book. To this end, we grant to you a limited, non-exclusive license to view, print, and make copies, without alteration and with author attribution, of these materials.