Title: Multi-sided Platforms: Theory and Simulation Methods
Abstract: Multi-sided platforms are services that coordinate two or more groups of people who need each other in some way (buyers and sellers, users and developers, etc.). The pricing behavior of these services seems to challenge traditional economic intuitions, but they are only a new way of competition. In this talk, we present the concept of multi-sided platforms, we describe their main characteristics, and what has been the focus of the literature in the last decade. Later, we address the open questions in the literature, and how we can model simple multi-sided platforms to address some of those issues. We present the challenges that traditional methods impose on modeling dynamic multi-sided platforms, and we introduce the concept of agent-based modeling as a new potential tool to address dynamic models. Lastly, we address the pros and cons of this method as a complement of traditional economic modeling, and we show how can be used to address new challenges in the literature.
