B2B electronic transaction platforms help business buyers and sellers find each other; help businesses manage procurement; and facilitate invoicing, payment and financing. A number of these platforms have emerged since the mid 1990s. Although the preponderance of transactions involve paper,...

This paper is about the regulation of bad behavior by participants on digital platforms. It shows that these platforms have private incentives to limit this bad behavior and, in fact, have rules, monitoring, and enforcement systems to do so. However, these private incentives may not provide...

Recent claims that online platforms have secured permanent monopolies, protected by barriers to entry from network effects and stockpiles of data, and should be the focus of intense antitrust and regulatory scrutiny, are inconsistent with the economics, technology, and history of online...

Times-Picayune, a 1953 Supreme Court decision involving newspapers, has gained notoriety from the Court's American Express decision concerning credit-card networks. The Amex dissent argued that the Court had already decided how to apply the rule-of-reason analysis to two-sided platforms in...

This volume collects a series of essays that I have written over the last decade on multi-sided platform businesses that create value by providing products that enable two or more different types of customers to get together, find each other, and exchange value. Part I presents background pieces...

A number of internet-based digital currency platform based on decentralized public ledgers have started since the introduction of the blockchain concept by the founder of Bitcoin in 2008. An important element of these public ledger platforms is an incentive system that elicits efforts from a...