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Endogenous Network Effects, Platform Pricing And Market Liquidity, Mei Lin, Ruhai Wu, Wen Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper examines a monopoly platform's two-sided pricing strategies in a setting with seller competition, which gives rise to not only positive cross-side network effects between buyers and sellers, but also a negative same-side network effect among sellers. We show that platform pricing depends crucially on the characteristics associated with market liquidity, which contrasts with the previous studies that point to the two sides' relative demand elasticities and/or network effects. A market is said to be more liquid when it has less friction, resulting in a larger total surplus for the platform economy and hence greater equilibrium entry on both …