Digital platforms have reshaped many product markets and play an increasingly important role in economies around the globe. Some of these platforms have become powerful players and may possess a lot of market power. Economists use a number of indicators to assess market power. In this article we...

Fee discrimination is commonly used by marketplace platforms (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Uber). To better understand how marketplace fee discrimination interacts with the hybrid platform business model, we model a marketplace platform that manages fees and categories across a continuum of retail...

Is there a problem with large technology firms, or platforms, purchasing nascent competitors and suppressing competition before they can mature into vibrant competitors? Further, if there is a problem, are the current antitrust laws and the enforcement of those laws sufficient to combat the...

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...

The power of today’s tech giants has prompted calls for changes in antitrust law and policy which, for decades, has been exceedingly permissive in merger enforcement and in constraining dominant firm conduct. Economically, the fear is that the largest digital platforms are so dominant and its...

The collection of user data by providers of online services recently has become a popular topic in debates about the application of competition policy to online markets. At issue is whether the collection of large amounts of data — sometimes referred to as “big data” — in particular data...

The aim of this paper is to reflect upon the need to adjust EU consumer contract law to take into account the changing market structure caused by the rise of online platforms such as Airbnb, Uber or Amazon Marketplace. It is argued that the existing regulatory framework is primarily focused on...

Platforms like Uber, Google Search, and Hulu pervade the modern economic landscape. A platform caters to distinct but deeply-interdependent “sides” of customers that derive value or revenues from one another, such as the merchants and cardholders on a credit card network, or the advertisers...

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...