Following the Internet’s widespread adoption, much economic work has studied ‘online platforms’: firms that mainly interact with consumers in cyberspace. This article surveys such work, focusing on the ways in which traditional economic models have been adapted to incorporate...

Auctions generally do not lead to efficient outcomes when the expected value of the object for sale depends on both private and common value information. We report a series of first-price auction experiments to test three key predictions of auctions with private and common values: (i)...

This paper studies an industry in which firms can choose to provide open or closed platforms. Open platforms, as opposed to closed, are extendable so third-party producers can develop extensions for them. Building on a two-sided market model, I show that firms might prefer to commit to keeping...

The pricing of payments has received increasing attention of regulators. In many cases, regulators are concerned that consumers do not face cost based prices. They argue that without cost based prices consumers will make inefficient choices. In this paper, it is argued that both, economics of...

We develop a model for two-sided markets with consumers and producers, who interact through a platform. Typical settings for the model are the market for smartphones with phone users, app producers, and smartphone operating systems; or the video game market with game players, video game...

This paper analyzes pricing decisions and competition in network markets, assuming that groups of consumers can coordinate their choices when it is in their interest, if coordination does not require communication. It is shown that multiple asymmetric networks can coexist in equilibrium. A...

We document non-linear stock effects in the relationship linking emerging technology adoption and network infrastructure increments. We exploit 2010-2017 data covering nascent to mature electric vehicle (EV) markets across 422 Norwegian municipalities together with two complementary...

This paper exploits a unique data set on the payment card industry to study issues associated with network effects and two-sided markets. We show that consumers concentrate their spending on a single payment network (single-homing), although many maintain unused cards that allow the ability to...

This paper is the second of two companion pieces. In the first we developed a model of competition between payment systems which extends that of Chakravorti and Roson (2006). Here we turn to the results which can be obtained from the Chakravorti and Roson model, from our extension of it, and...

This paper is the first of two companion pieces examining competition between payment systems. Here we develop a model of competing platforms which generalises that considered by Chakravorti and Roson (2006). In particular, our model allows for fully endogenous multi-homing on both the merchant...