Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Essays on Platform Competition and Two-sided Markets written by Robin Seung-Jin Lee and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation comprises three essays on the industrial organization of platform and two-sided markets. In these networked industries, agents on one side of the market adopt, join, or visit a platform intermediary in order to access goods or services provided by agents on another side of the market. All three essays focus on environments where one side of the market consists of a small number of strategic firms, and analyze competition among platforms to get members of this oligopolistic side "on-board." The first essay provides a model of platform competition for symmetric firms that allows for general externalities across both contracting and non-contracting partners, and addresses the question of when a market will sustain a single or multiple platforms. When firms and consumers can join only one platform, the essay provide conditions under which market-tipping and market-splitting equilibria may exist, and illustrates how either outcome may still be inefficient despite the presence of contingent contracts.