Assajos sobre mercats bilaterals
- Autores: Sven Hanold
- Directores de la Tesis: Sjaak Hurkens (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: catalán
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: David Pérez Castrillo (presid.), Simon Anderson (secret.), Markus Reisinger (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Análisis Económico por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
While some two-sided market platforms such as newspapers have been operating for hundreds of years, the more recent prevalence and dominance of tech giants such as FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) have profoundly transformed the global economy. Despite these firms' very different activities, a shared key characteristic is acting as an intermediary by connecting two or more distinct groups of economic agents. By subscribing to a platform, each agent creates value for other agents on the platform. Due to these indirect network externalities, rules that have been designed for traditional markets by the industrial organization literature are often not adequate to assess two-sided market outcomes. This dissertation contains three essays that study several issues on how platforms operate and compete.
In Chapter 1, I study competitive forces that determine the impact of a value-added tax (VAT) reduction for digital newspapers on readership and supply of digital news. First, I formulate a model of digital newspaper demand and entry in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. A VAT reduction raises readership if the price competition, market expansion, and matching effects from additional entry outweigh the direct pricing effect on consumers. Second, I calibrate the model parameters using Norwegian data on digital newspaper readership, prices, and revenues. The calibrated model implies that the VAT rate reduction by Norway in 2016 has increased consumer surplus and has reduced the news under-supply in the market. Finally, I explore alternative policies: by accounting for the two-sidedness of digital news, a value-added advertising subsidy is more effective than a VAT reduction in increasing readership since it leads to a direct price decrease as well as additional entry.
In Chapter 2, I study the incentives of an incumbent platform to use a long-term contract for sellers to deter efficient entry. Whether a long-term contract is an anti-competitive instrument hinges on the homing assumptions of the two sides - that is, if a side can engage with the other side on only one or multiple platforms. If sellers single-home and consumers can multi-home or cross-group externalities are absent, I formally show that the Chicago critique holds: sellers do not sign a long-term contract that reduces competition unless they are fully compensated for doing so, which the incumbent cannot afford. If the homing assumption is reversed and cross-group externalities are sufficiently large, the incumbent is strictly better off using an exclusive long-term contract. Since the platforms compete for the single-homing consumers, the sellers' surplus is extracted even in the absence of a contract and the incumbent can readily incentivize the sellers to sign a contract.
In Chapter 3, I study incentives to invest in platform quality by organizations that operate either in a one- or two-sided mode. In the one-sided mode, multi-product firms (MPF) produce and sell varieties to consumers themselves. In the two-sided mode, platforms solely act as intermediaries between sellers and consumers. While platforms in either mode under-invest relative to the first-best in my set-up, MPFs invest more in quality than two-sided platforms. By producing the products themselves, MPFs better account for the cross-group benefits of products for consumers, which gives them an additional incentive to invest in quality to increase the customer base.
