Les déterminants de la politique de tarification dynamique sur un marché biface. Le cas des logiciels de type client-serveur

This paper characterizes the determinants of the pricing policy of a firm that operates on a two-sided market. The application market is client-server software on the Internet. To study the research question, we draw some elements of the literatures on new product diffusion and on two-sided markets. We obtain analytical results and give simulations of dynamic pricing policies. We obtain two main results. (1) For an important class of demand functions, the impact on the pricing policy of the intermarket externality is as important as the intra market externality. (2) An alternative pricing policy for which the software client is free has very little impact on the intertemporal profit.