TY  - BOOK
AU  - Evans,David S.
AU  - Schmalensee,Richard
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Antitrust Analysis of Multi-Sided Platform Businesses
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2013///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - February 2013; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - This Chapter provides a survey of the economics literature on multi-sided platforms with particular focus on competition policy issues, including market definition, mergers, monopolization, and coordinated behavior.   It provides a survey of the general industrial organization theory of multi-sided platforms and then considers various issues concerning the application of antitrust analysis to multi-sided platform businesses.  It shows that it is not possible to know whether standard economic models, often relied on for antitrust analysis, apply to multi-sided platforms without explicitly considering the existence of multiple customer groups with interdependent demand. It summarizes many theoretical and empirical papers that demonstrate that a number of results for single-sided firms, which are the focus of much of the applied antitrust economics literature, do not apply directly to multi-sided platforms
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w18783
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w18783
ER  -