TY  - JOUR
AU  - Evans,David S.
AU  - Schmalensee,Richard
TI  - The Antitrust Analysis of Multi-Sided Platform Businesses
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18783
PY  - 2013
Y2  - February 2013
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18783
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18783.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David S. Evans
Global Economics Group
18 Tremont Street
Suite 220
Boston, MA 02108
E-Mail: David.Evans@marketplatforms.com

Richard Schmalensee
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-520
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/253-2957
Fax: 617/258-6617
E-Mail: rschmal@mit.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -