Why do rational users join a platform that ultimately makes them worse off?
Analyzes the AI technology stack to evaluate the potential for market concentration and competition policy challenges.
(with Julian Wright) December 2025
How platforms design search and discovery to increase new seller–buyer matches while minimizing cannibalization of sellers’ existing demand.
Three strategies brands can use to add platform elements to their products or services.
(with Bobby Zhou) October 2024
A framework for distinguishing high-potential marketplaces from those destined to fail, focusing on the defensibility of their network effects.
(with Julian Wright) July-August 2024
Why do buyers and sellers bypass marketplaces after using them to connect, and what can the marketplaces do to combat such leakage?
Companies can turn generative AI into a lasting competitive advantage by building customized tools and, ultimately, self-reinforcing data feedback loops based on their unique customer data.
(with Scott Cook and Julian Wright) January-February 2024
What are the economic factors that determine the competitive advantage firms can obtain when using customer data to continuously improve their products?
Although it may seem unfair for platforms like Amazon to sell their own products alongside third-party sellers, banning this practice can actually harm consumers.
While digital platforms can help businesses reach more customers, they also risk commoditizing sellers, so firms need strategies to maintain control over pricing, branding, and customer relationships.
(with Julian Wright) May-June 2021
When should a firm build a platform by inviting rivals to sell products or services on top of its core product?
To what extent do marketplaces need to worry about insufficient exploration of new sellers by buyers?
Under what conditions do data feedback loops create defensible moats?
(with Julian Wright) January-February 2020
A theory of ad valorem contracts (where price varies with transaction value) which explains their widespread use in vertical relationships like franchising and licensing.
How should firms decide whether to employ professionals and control how they deliver services to clients, or to operate as a platform enabling independent professionals to provide services directly to clients?
Should workers providing services via platforms like Handy or Uber be classified as independent contractors or employees - or something in-between?
How to transform products into platforms with network effects in order to accelerate growth and enhance defensibility.
(with Elizabeth Altman) July-August 2017
What are the main pitfalls to avoid when building marketplace businesses?
(with Simon Rothman) April 2016
The fundamental economic tradeoffs when firms choose to position themselves closer or further from a multi-sided platform business model.
What are the economic tradeoffs faced by intermediaries when choosing to operate as a marketplace (suppliers sell directly to buyers) or as a reseller (buy from suppliers and sell to buyers)?
Platforms with stronger market power benefit when users are well informed about pricing, while platforms facing intense competition earn more when users are less informed.
Platforms sometimes steer users toward unwanted products to boost revenue, and whether competition increases or reduces this behavior depends on how intense the competition is and how platforms charge users.
To succeed, multi-sided platforms must choose the right number of sides, the right design and governance rules to eliminate market failures, and the right pricing structure to balance participation on all sides.
Winter 2014
Platforms’ decisions to create their own content depend on user expectations and whether that content competes with or complements third-party offerings.
(with Daniel Spulber) April 2013
While marketplaces like eBay seem attractive, many businesses are better off acting as resellers—or a hybrid—because controlling pricing, quality, and the customer experience is often crucial for success.
(with Julian Wright) March 2013
The fragmented and opaque nature of patent markets has spawned new intermediaries (from platforms to aggregators and trolls), which solve some problems, but create new inefficiencies and controversies.
(with David B. Yoffie) Winter 2013
Whether content ends up exclusive to one platform or available on many depends largely on who controls pricing.
The economic incentives that drive platforms to steer consumer search toward higher-margin but potentially sub-optimal products.
Platforms like Google and Amazon can expand a company’s reach, but firms must carefully choose whether and how to use them because they can also take control of customers and capture much of the value.
(with David B. Yoffie) April 2009
How should platforms that connect buyers and sellers decide who to charge, depending on how much consumers value variety and how much power sellers have?
Winter 2009
Instead of trying to attract both sides at once, two-sided platforms can overcome the "chicken-and-egg" problem by building one side first and then gradually adding the other.
(with Thomas Eisenmann) November 2007
Intermediaries choose between acting as resellers or as platforms connecting buyers and sellers, based on factors like coordination problems, pricing control, and incentives for sellers to invest in quality.
June 2007
When sellers join a platform before buyers, the platform sometimes finds it profitable not to commit to future prices, especially when sellers are uncertain about the platform’s success.
Fall 2006