two-sided market

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description: market having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits

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The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

by Tim Wu  · 4 Nov 2025  · 246pp  · 65,143 words

. “agora,” accessed June 7, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/​topic/​agora. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” Journal of the European Academic Association 1, no. 4 (2003). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

by Nadia Eghbal  · 3 Aug 2020  · 1,136pp  · 73,489 words

substitutable content they create decision fatigue for consumers.362 Subscription models can operate like a freemium model, but they get even more interesting as a two-sided market. In a freemium model, a creator gives away some of their content for free, but restricts other content to those with paid subscriptions. The free

content helps creators grow their reputation via public network effects. In a two-sided market, paying subscribers subsidize all of the content for nonpaying readers, under the assumption that creators aren’t actually selling content but a sense of membership

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction

by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham  · 17 Jan 2020  · 207pp  · 59,298 words

is to create a digital context in which buyers of labour power are able to connect with sellers of labour power (what economists call a ‘two-sided market’). Uber’s platform connects people who want a taxi ride with people who are willing to provide taxi rides. Fiverr’s platform connects people looking

shift maximal risk and minimal reward onto workers. Platform companies achieve this through technologies and infrastructures of connectivity that allow work to be organized via two-sided markets, political environments that impose few regulations, a zeitgeist that values flexibility, and a backdrop of increasing inequality that leads ever more workers to make the

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy

by Christopher Mims  · 13 Sep 2021  · 385pp  · 112,842 words

that such marketplaces for labor have always meant. As one economist who worked with actual Uber data discovered, the wage that workers in such fluid, two-sided markets for unskilled labor inevitably garner is whatever the local minimum wage happens to be. It would be a future for truck drivers not unlike our

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms

by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee  · 23 May 2016  · 383pp  · 81,118 words

they must use nontraditional, counterintuitive strategies to make money and survive. After working out a pioneering economic model, they wrote a paper, “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” which began circulating among economists in 2000.18 Economists now call these businesses multisided platforms because some of them actually facilitate interactions between more than

computer chips, the Internet, the web, broadband communications, programming languages and operating systems, and the Cloud. Airbnb, for example, benefits from all of these technologies. Two-sided market: The original name used to refer to industries that had “two-sided platforms.” Two-sidedness is a characteristic of businesses, not always of industries, however

Hottest Spot in Town,” Fortune, August 14, 2009, http://fortune.com/2009/08/14/opentable-the-hottest-spot-in-town/. 2. They are also called two-sided markets, intermediaries, and brokers. A few years ago, we tried calling them “catalysts,” since, like chemical catalysts, they encourage reactions, but the name has not caught

making transactions. 17. “OpenTable Terms of Use,” http://www.opentable.com/info/agreement.aspx. 18. See Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” Journal of the European Economic Association 1, no. 4 (2003). As is increasingly common in academic economics, their paper was widely circulated several years before

it appeared in print. The term “two-sided market” has fallen out of favor, as it has become clear that two- or multisidedness is an attribute of individual businesses, not necessarily of all businesses

discussion of this paper and other early economic papers on multisided platforms is given by Richard Schmalensee, “An Instant Classic: Rochet & Tirole, Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” Competition Policy International 10, no. 2 (2014). 19. In suburban America, they even give people free parking and, often, entertainment. Single-sided businesses don’t

, Special Issue: Strategy Content Research (1988). 6. “Google Ngram Viewer,” https://books.google.com/ngrams. 7. Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” Journal of the European Economic Association 1, no. 4 (2003). 8. This discussion is based largely on Andrei Hagiu, “The Last DVD Format War?” Case

participation on that side. We hasten to point out that this is not a general prescription. Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” Journal of the European Economic Association 1, no. 4 (2003). 18. We are ignoring costs for now to keep things simple. More generally, pricing structure

, 19, 35 microchips, 40–41 operating systems, 43–44 pioneering platforms, 37 checklist for, 150–155 retail creative destruction and, 181–196 “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets” (Rochet & Tirole), 15 platforms, 16–17 foundational, 40 multi-homing with, 28 reseller, 107–108 sizing, 124–126 vertically integrated, 106–107 PriceGrabber, 186 price

Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading

by Joel Hasbrouck  · 4 Jan 2007  · 209pp  · 13,138 words

incentives. Perhaps the best-known designated dealer is the NYSE specialist. The specialist has many roles and responsibilities, but an important one is maintaining a two-sided market when there is nothing on the limit order book and no one else on the floor bidding or offering. Establishing the proper incentives for designated

Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control

by Kenneth L. Grant  · 1 Sep 2004

scale up in size, the need to operate on both sides of a given market becomes more pronounced, and I strongly urge this kind of two-sided market orientation as being one of the best means of maximizing risk-adjusted profitability. However, I should tell you that this challenge is, in my experience

cause all securities to move in lockstep with one another. Perhaps as important, Adjusting Portfolio Exposure (Rule 2) 137 the presence of some well-adapted two-sided market exposure will greatly enhance your ability to stay with your best ideas—across all market cycles—and thus capitalize in those situations when you feel

profit or at a loss. When viewed at a safely objective distance from the actual portfolio management process, it is easy to see how a two-sided market orientation, with one side serving largely as instruments of risk control, could offer better risk-adjusted returns than one that focused exclusively on either longs

–222 258 Transactions-level analysis: benefits of, 79 core statistics, 161–168 database, overview, 156–158 position snapshot statistics, 160–161 transaction defined, 158–160 Two-sided market, 135–137, 140 Underlying markets, 117 Underlying price, 149–150 Unit impact ratio, 187 Value at Risk (VaR) calculation: accuracy testing, 98–99, 103 and

Broken Markets: How High Frequency Trading and Predatory Practices on Wall Street Are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio

by Sal Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi  · 21 May 2012  · 318pp  · 87,570 words

market maker wanted to place an offer to only sell stock, he would have to place a stub quote as a bid to create a two-sided market. When Accenture traded at $0.01 during the Flash Crash, the bid that was hit was a stub quote. According to the SEC Flash Crash

dominant) type of pseudo market maker act in the interest of the markets when we really need them? Will they step up and maintain a two-sided market, or will they simply shut off the machines and walk away? Even worse, will they seek even further profit and exacerbate the downside?”34 Zero

on the market cap of the stock and a minimum order life on all orders. 3. To reward market makers for creating a more stable two-sided market, there also needs to be a minimum spread that is wider than a penny. No doubt, our critics will claim that this alternative is going

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson  · 26 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 117,093 words

low prices, since doing so will maximize its revenue. Figure 8 Most demand curves are not straight lines. Sometimes, they have this shape. But in two-sided markets, simply working its way down the demand curve is only a small part of the story. To better understand Uber’s pricing decisions, let’s

prospered. For instance, credit cards provide a valuable service to both consumers and merchants. In theory, credit card issuers could charge both halves of this two-sided market. In practice, they sometimes do exactly that: charging annual fees to consumers and processing fees of 2% or more to merchants. In fact, in the

users, they give them away for free to maximize demand. That way, they make more money on merchant fees on the other half of the two-sided market. By lowering the annual fees and other user charges on their cards, credit card issuers can not only increase the market share of the cards

direct cash bonuses for using a card. Charging negative prices for a product or service would make little sense for ordinary goods, but for a two-sided market it can be a sustainable and consistently profitable strategy. Giving It Away and Locking Them In A number of important tactical and strategic decisions remain

that each side of the market gets from participating and aren’t too greedy. Once you understand the logic of two-sided markets, the next step is to apply it to multisided markets. Two-sided markets often become multisided markets with dozens or even thousands of distinct subgroups interacting through the platform. For instance, iTunes is

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us

by Tim Sullivan  · 6 Jun 2016  · 252pp  · 73,131 words

practice of selling items to the highest bidder, was launched, with thirty pages of algebra, in the Journal of Finance in 1961. Recent work on two-sided markets like Uber or Google that sit between customers and drivers or between web searchers and advertisers has helped to guide the strategies of companies looking

(as in, “let’s buy Intel as the first step in our global domination of the microprocessor business [cue evil laughter]”). Economists instead talk about two-sided markets or, as the case may be, multisided markets. You might reasonably ask what market doesn’t have two sides. You go to the supermarket, go

’s value, so both sides stick around to play. (Think about the value proposition at eBay if conmen dominated its sellers’ ranks.) Looking at a two-sided market through this lens—as a space where people meet and not just where trade takes place—is a new angle to understanding exchange. The difference

between one-sided and two-sided markets is subtle but meaningful. It changes the way that we might approach the market as a business or a consumer. And it affects how a

richly rewarded for it. While every multisided market has its own eccentricities, there are some overarching principles like these, which can help to clarify where two-sided markets are most needed, and why they take the particular forms they do. The Variety of Rules Market makers are confronted with many choices in the

based on misunderstandings of what makes a platform tick. Platform Builder as Internet Cop The economist who did the most to formalize our understanding of two-sided markets is Jean Tirole, a Frenchman who won the Nobel Prize in 2014.10 Within economics, Tirole is known for his superhuman productivity and, relatedly, his

also applied himself to the question of how to regulate credit cards, which in turn led to a series of papers that aimed to understand two-sided markets more broadly: examining why they exist, what makes them different from the one-sided variety, and how competing platforms like Visa and Amex vie for

on both sides of their respective markets, and providing some guiding principles for builders of two-sided markets and the authorities that regulate them. Much of Tirole’s work on platforms takes as its starting point that a two-sided market is one where participants on either side couldn’t simply find one another and strike

to think about it. One of Tirole’s platform insights—the one with the most tangible consequences for the person on the street—is that two-sided markets are in many ways just a particular case of network externalities, one that works across the two sides of the platform. And that leads to

wide gap between what each side of the market pays to meet on Google. This state of affairs is entirely common in the realm of two-sided markets: many credit card companies don’t charge cardholders or even give them discounts, while merchants pay through the nose; shopping malls, a

two-sided market from an earlier era, charge their tenants rent, while offering free parking and other inducements to attract shoppers. Sometimes the way that platforms charge can

, that’s a fantastic gig. It’s the job of government regulators to reign in the power of the all-powerful market maker in many two-sided markets.17 The credit card market also serves to indicate why the inequitable treatment of participants on different sides of the platform is so common. Although

. But often we have one default choice that we use for most of our purchases. We are single-homing as credit card users. If a two-sided market is only useful when both sides are on board, then there’s intense rivalry to enlist the single-homers, who can shop around among competing

get together to do business. 6. Jean Tirole and Jean-Charles Rochet convey this point more precisely in a 2006 article where they show that two-sided markets are only necessary when the Coase Theorem fails. This theorem, more a conjecture provided by economist Ronald Coase, essentially argues that free markets maximize efficiency

, which had existed for a while, where you had to pay the full balance at the end of every month. 10. Tirole’s work on two-sided markets was done with Jean-Charles Rochet, an economist at the University of Zurich. 11. Paul Samuelson, Economics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988; first published 1948

auction listings, 94–97 concerns on model for, 43, 46, 48 on seller motivation for giving to charities, 73–75 start of, 39–41 as two-sided market, 109, 119 e-commerce, 41–43, 52–55 “The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp” (Radford), 7 economics applied theory in, 45, 50

gang, 61 Shapley, Lloyd, 134–136, 137–138, 163–164 Shapley-Gale algorithm, 137–140 Shi, Peng, 148 Shleifer, Andrei, 180–181 shopping malls, as two-sided markets, 122–123 Shoup, Carl, 85 sick organizations, 142–143 signaling model applications of, 66–68 commitment signs, 62–66 competitive signaling, 69–71 integrity, 71

-interval auctions, 82 Tirole, Jean, 117–118 Torres, Robert, 61 Toshiba’s HD DVD format war, 125–126 traditional economics, 110, 133 Trafigura company, 168 two-sided markets, 108–112, 118–124 Uber, 2, 3, 5, 16, 50, 109, 111, 119, 125, 128, 129, 132, 169–173 unethical conduct, in competition, 180–181

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information

by Frank Pasquale  · 17 Nov 2014  · 320pp  · 87,853 words

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit

by Marina Krakovsky  · 14 Sep 2015  · 270pp  · 79,180 words

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols  · 25 Sep 2017  · 391pp  · 71,600 words

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment

by Sangeet Paul Choudary  · 14 Sep 2015  · 302pp  · 73,581 words

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You

by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker  · 27 Mar 2016  · 421pp  · 110,406 words

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth  · 3 Oct 2019

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The

by Mariana Mazzucato  · 25 Apr 2018  · 457pp  · 125,329 words

The Payoff

by Jeff Connaughton  · 202pp  · 66,742 words

Virtual Competition

by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke  · 30 Nov 2016

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success

by Tom Eisenmann  · 29 Mar 2021  · 387pp  · 106,753 words

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy

by Jeremias Prassl  · 7 May 2018  · 491pp  · 77,650 words

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners

by Larry Harris  · 2 Jan 2003  · 1,164pp  · 309,327 words

Stigum's Money Market, 4E

by Marcia Stigum and Anthony Crescenzi  · 9 Feb 2007  · 1,202pp  · 424,886 words

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

by Roger McNamee  · 1 Jan 2019  · 382pp  · 105,819 words

High-Frequency Trading

by David Easley, Marcos López de Prado and Maureen O'Hara  · 28 Sep 2013

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly  · 6 Jun 2016  · 371pp  · 108,317 words

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

by Arun Sundararajan  · 12 May 2016  · 375pp  · 88,306 words

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems

by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier  · 14 Oct 2017  · 240pp  · 78,436 words

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power

by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie  · 6 May 2019  · 328pp  · 84,682 words

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson  · 30 May 2016  · 324pp  · 89,875 words

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent

by Joseph E. Stiglitz  · 22 Apr 2019  · 462pp  · 129,022 words

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass

by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri  · 6 May 2019  · 346pp  · 97,330 words

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff  · 15 Jan 2019  · 918pp  · 257,605 words

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz  · 1 Mar 2013  · 567pp  · 122,311 words

Platform Capitalism

by Nick Srnicek  · 22 Dec 2016  · 116pp  · 31,356 words

Market Sense and Nonsense

by Jack D. Schwager  · 5 Oct 2012  · 297pp  · 91,141 words

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media

by Tarleton Gillespie  · 25 Jun 2018  · 390pp  · 109,519 words

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back

by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy  · 15 Mar 2020  · 296pp  · 83,254 words

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change

by Bharat Anand  · 17 Oct 2016  · 554pp  · 149,489 words

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters

by Diane Coyle  · 15 Apr 2025  · 321pp  · 112,477 words

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

by Cory Doctorow  · 6 Oct 2025  · 313pp  · 94,415 words

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein  · 6 Sep 2021

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt  · 20 Apr 2015  · 294pp  · 82,438 words

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency

by Roger L. Martin  · 28 Sep 2020  · 600pp  · 72,502 words

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

by Alvin E. Roth  · 1 Jun 2015  · 282pp  · 80,907 words

How to DeFi

by Coingecko, Darren Lau, Sze Jin Teh, Kristian Kho, Erina Azmi, Tm Lee and Bobby Ong  · 22 Mar 2020  · 135pp  · 26,407 words