Two-Sided Markets and Card Payment Systems : New Approaches and Trends Under Art. 101 TFEU

The paper aims at providing a thorough overview of the special nature of card payment systems that are a well-known example of two-sided markets. Indeed, card payment systems are an instance of two-sided market because they serve two different groups of customers or end-users (i.e. cardholders and merchants) with a joint demand, and they present network externalities in terms of the interconnected role exercised by end-users on those markets, so that the more cardholders there are the more they make the card payment system valuable for merchants, and the other way around. Therefore, the specific nature of card payment systems constitutes the ground for the analysis of two recent decisions in competition law, namely the case of Groupement des Cartes Bancaires and the case of MasterCard I. The legal and economic reflections that are raised in this paper aim, therefore, to illustrate the interconnections and commonalities between these two cases in terms of constructing and providing a possible definition of two-sided markets under article 101 TFEU