Platform Governance

Abstract

Platforms that intermediate trades—such as Amazon, Airbnb, and eBay—play a regulatory role in deciding how to govern the marketplaces they create. We propose a framework to analyze a platform’s nonprice governance design and its incentive to act in a welfare-enhancing manner. We show that the platform’s governance design can be distorted toward inducing insufficient or excessive seller competition, depending on the nature of the fee instrument employed by the platform. These results are illustrated with micro-founded applications to a platform’s control over seller entry, information provision and recommendations, quality standards, and search-design choices. (JEL D21, D83, L15, L23, L81, M37)

Two-sided markets, pricing, and network effects

“…11 Teh (2021) and Choi and Jeon (2020) provide interesting analysis of the link between pricing instruments and platform design.…”

A Framework of Transaction Packaging in High-throughput Blockchains

“…Our paper relates to the literature on the platform economy and multi-sided markets. Note that large numbers of studies on the multi-sided market have been proposed, which starts with the seminal works by Rochet and Tirole [2003], Rochet and Tirole [2006], Caillaud and Jullien [2003], Armstrong [2006] for the two-sided market, and most recent contributions to this strand of literature include Weyl [2010], Jullien and Pavan [2019], Tan and Zhou [2021], Teh [2022], among many others. Most of the existing literature on multisided platforms has focused on both centralized monopolistic and duopolistic platforms.…”

Efficient Copyright Filters for Online Hosting Platforms

“…(prominent examples include Johnson et al, 2020, Johnen and Somogyi, 2021, and Teh, 2021. This is an issue that has also attracted significant policy interest (e.g., see Section 4.III of Crémer et al, 2019).…”