The antitrust law issues that made headlines in 2018 included the
two-sided market analysis, merger challenges, and no-poach agreements.
Suppose one defined a single,
two-sided market comprising services sold to both restaurants and consumers.
Although Tirole believes in antitrust laws to limit monopoly power, he points out that regulators must be cautious in bringing the law to bear against firms in "
two-sided markets." An example of a
two-sided market is a manufacturer of videogame consoles.
One explanation for this substitution is that as platforms in a
two-sided market, NGOs allocate some of the costs of aid provision to donors, allowing NGOs to provide aid at a price below the competitive market price.
and the EU) may not see consumer harm, even though search is better seen as a
two-sided market, in which advertisers not users form the other side.
In their classic early paper in this literature, Rochet and Tirole (2006) make this issue the key to defining a
two-sided market: "The price structure matters, and the platform must design it so as to bring both sides on board." There is in general one side of the platforms whose participants cross-subsidise those on the other side.
The merger is expected to strengthen Ciox's ability to facilitate the management and exchange of protected health information through a
two-sided market.
Gifford and Kudrle's chapter on Microsoft could have served as a springboard to discuss
two-sided market analysis in tech markets.
We propose that film markets can be viewed as a specific, and in some ways unusual, example of a
two-sided market. The literature on multi-sided markets, although somewhat in flux, identifies three basic conditions which define them (3): (1) two (or more) sets of customers interact through an intermediary (supplier); (2) some type of network externality exists in that the decisions of each set of customers affect the outcomes of the other sets, often indirectly; (3) the externality is not readily internalized by each customer set due to high transaction costs of information.
In particular, we address the issue of whether the standard results on the ranking of Cournot and Bertrand equilibrium outcomes under differentiated duopoly are robust to the inclusion of a
two-sided market in a software industry.
"Is online media a
two-sided market?" (2015) 31:1 Computer Law & Security Review.
Supreme Court "has felt free to revise [its] legal analysis as economic understanding evolves and to reverse antitrust precedents that misperceived a practice's competitive consequences." (5) At some point, stakeholders--economic consultants, lawyers, lobbyists, and governments--will invite antitrust agencies, courts, and regulators to pass judgment on
two-sided market arguments.