Online trade platforms: Hosting, selling, or both?

Abstract

We illustrate conditions under which a trade platform selling its own products along with third-party sellers benefits or harms consumers. This benefits consumers by lowering prices in a suite of models: a gatekeeper platform facing competitive fringe of sellers, when fringe sellers can also have their own channels perfectly or imperfectly substitutable to the platform, when the gatekeeper platform with fringe sellers competes against a big seller with market power on a differentiated alternative channel, and when the gatekeeper platform hosts only a big seller with market power. The platform selling its own products harms consumers when consumers have heterogenous tastes for variants of products and the platform can control the access of fringe sellers via its commission and own product price. We also review the recent literature to highlight other channels via which benefits and harm arise from the platform selling its own products in its marketplace.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.