Blockchain technologies are designed to promote decentralization and self-governance in economic and social settings. In the context of platforms, an early claim of some proponents of these technologies was that blockchains would promote disintermediation, replacing intermediaries with...

Many Internet intermediaries operate two-sided networks, that is, they provide platforms to bring together two types of participants, or quot;sides,quot; such as buyers and sellers. This paper develops a model that characterizes the intermediary's pricing in two-sided networks, the value created...

A major result in the study of two-sided platforms is the strategic interdependence between the two sides of the same platform, leading to the implication that a platform can maximize its total profits by subsidizing one of its sides. We show that this result largely depends on assuming that at...

Platform-specific digital tokens are becoming increasingly common with the proliferation of initial coin offerings (ICOs). In addition to a novel financing mechanism, such tokens can help address the coordination problem that is common in network adoption. We develop a model to investigate the...