Monday, November 16, 2015

An Instant Classic: Rochet & Tirole, Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets

The press release announcing that Jean Tirole had been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences noted that he had “made important theoretical research contributions in a number of areas.” One of his most important contributions was the discovery and pioneering analysis of multi-sided platforms in his 2003 paper with Jean-Charles Rochet, Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets. According to Google Scholar, this paper has been cited over 1800 times, fourth among Jean’s many papers.

The Rochet &Tirole paper has spawned an enormous literature in a very short time—over 200 papers by the end of 2012, and the economics of multi-sided platforms is now a standard component of graduate courses in industrial organization. The RT paper is the first post-2000 academic paper to be deemed a classic by Competition Policy International, an honor it richly deserves….


- Full paper here

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