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Article Economics

The multisidedness of crowdfunding platforms

First published on IPdigIT. A number of posts on this blog have already dealt with multisided platforms (see here) and with crowdfunding (see here). My aim with this post is to link the two topics and show that crowdfunding platforms are a prime example of multisided platforms. Crowdfunding platforms (CFPs) facilitate the interaction between entrepreneurs […]

Categories
Article Economics

Mind. your own. business school – a case study of a multi-sided platform

First published on IPdigIT. This blog post is based on the comments of Master students to an article posted by Paul Belleflamme on IPdigIT in April 2014. source: mybs.eu A large part of today’s most successful and fastest growing business ventures is in fact multi-sided. Meaning they enable and derive value from the interaction between […]

Categories
Article Economics

What drives self-regulation in the nascent P2P “ride-sharing” industry?

First published on IPdigIT. The American company Uber has been all over the news in Belgium over the last three weeks. Uber connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for ride-sharing services; it appears therefore as a typical two-sided platform. As Evans (2011) explains it, a business opportunity emerges for a two-sided (or multi-sided) platform when […]

Categories
Article Economics

Online banking, switching costs and competition: a complex story

First published on IPdigIT. (Updated February 7, 2013) In an article published in October 2012 in the New York Times, Nelson D. Schwartz suggests that online banking creates switching costs and, thereby, reduces competition in the US banking sector. The title of the article summarizes the argument in a forceful way: “Online Banking Keeps Customers […]