Antitrust and Platform Monopoly

The Lawful Acquisition and Exercise of Monopoly Power and Its Implications for the Objectives of Antitrust

The Platform Economy and Natural Monopoly: regulating or laissez-faire?

The platform economy has been a hot issue all over the world, especially in china. The Chinese capital market has witnessed substantial cases of mergers and acquisitions among those platforms recent years. Three IT industry giants in China,BAT(Baidu,Alibaba,Tecent), are all developing towards gigantic system of various platforms through purchasing related small platforms or investing in some ne...

The strategic use of download limits by a monopoly platform

We consider a heretofore unexplored explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers, might impose download limits on content consumers: doing so increases the degree to which those consumers view content providers’ products as substitutes. This, in turn, intensifies the competition among providers, generating greater surplus for consumers. A platform, in turn, can capture this...

The Antitrust Analysis of Multi-sided Platform Businesses

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 mul...

Monopoly and Product Selection

It is well known that if a monopolist serving a market of substitute products can perfectly price discriminate, the socially optimal set of products (or ‘characteristics’) will be supplied. This follows since the profits of the perfectly discriminating monopolist are equal to the consumers’ surplus. Thus the monopolist will provide the product selection that maximizes consumers’ surplus [see Wh...