Tag Archives: competition

When everything is a platform

Posted on by

Sometimes it seems like nobody wants to set up a business these days; it has to be a platform. These come in different flavours of course, from sharing economy start-ups to existing online social or other networks. Whatever, the platform concept has become ubiquitous. Like many ubiquitous concepts, its definition is a bit fuzzy and its exact characteristics variable, but the basics are well-understood: an entity enabling value-creating interactions between different groups of people; with the value coming from network effects (across the sides of the platform) and often also the improved matching of transacting parties enabled reduced information/transaction costs. Thus Ebay provides sellers with lots of buyers and vice versa, and enables people to sell or buy niche items.

It’s intriguing that for many people everything looks like a platform now. The economics of multi-sided platforms (or two-sided markets) dates back to the early 2000s. The well-known Rochet and Tirole paper was published in 2004 and had been circulating for a while before then, while Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne were publishing related work in 2000. In their new book [amazon_link id=”0393249131″ target=”_blank” ]Platform Revolution: How networked markets are transforming the economy and how to make them work for you[/amazon_link] Parker and Van Alstyne, joined by co-author Sangeet Paul Choudary argue that once platforms became possible, they became inevitable: “Platforms virtually always win… Pipelines [ie traditional businesses] rely on inefficienct gatekeepers. … The platform can grow to scale more rapidly and efficiently because traditional gatekeepers are replaced by market signals provided automatically by the entire community.” What’s more, platforms do not need the same investment in physical capital as a pipeline business and have no idle capacity – think Airbnb versus hotel chains. They do not need inventory. The community can even provide the quality control and certification.

[amazon_image id=”0393249131″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets are Transforming the Economy–and How to Make Them Work for You[/amazon_image]

The book is a very accessible introduction to the economics of multi-sided platforms, very much from the perspective of a business audience, people who might want to set one up. Introductory chapters describing platforms and the basic economic principles are followed by chapters on how to design a successful platform – how to provide value and set prices to balance both sides appropriately; how to acquire and use data; successful launch and growth strategies; monetization; growth; competition issues; and regulatory issues. There are helpful examples throughout – eight different cases of launch strategies that worked, for instance.

If you don’t know the economics literature, this book is a clear and practical guide to platforms. If you do know it – and I’ve now read a fair amount – the analysis will be familiar, albeit with lots of interesting and useful examples that still make it worthwhile.  I found the chapter on strategy the most interesting. It notes the challenges of getting to successful scale, although I think in fact underestimates them. It also discusses the complexity of competition (or as it’s sometimes called ‘convergence’ – everybody competing with everbody) and the advantages that go to those able to take a very long term view. The book’s main downside is apparent in this chapter too: it’s a Pollyanna view of platforms. I’d have liked a more challenging discussion of competition among the titans and the regulatory and even political questions this raises. (I set out my thoughts on this on the FT’s The Exchange blog.)

All in all, though, this book is a welcome addition to the still quite small non-technical literature on platforms, which is much needed given how complicated the academic literature on this subject has become.

Capitalism and the law

Posted on by

My previous post – the ten books a well-educated social science student ought to have read – generated a lot of terrific comments with other suggestions, which I’ll mull over and compile into an alternative list at the weekend.

Meanwhile, I’ve read [amazon_link id=”0674504917″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law[/amazon_link] by Brett Christophers. I greatly admired his previous book, [amazon_link id=”1444338293″ target=”_blank” ]Banking Across Boundaries[/amazon_link], and this new one has the same compelling combination of analysis and historical detail. The theme this time is capitalism as a constant balance between competitive markets and market power, these two forces applied by laws and their enforcement. Anti-trust laws are enacted or enforced with greater rigour when monopoly power gets out of hand. Intellectual property laws are strengthened after periods of cut-throat competition. In contrast to those – often Marxist – writers who have seen a single direction of travel toward ever-greater monopoly power, Christophers argues here that there is a cycle. He cites [amazon_link id=”0853450811″ target=”_blank” ]Kalecki[/amazon_link], but also Marx’s dialectics: “Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly,” Christophers quotes Marx as writing in a letter of 1846.

[amazon_image id=”0674504917″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law[/amazon_image]

The book starts with three chapters setting out Christophers’ analytical framework and explaining in more detail the dynamic to and fro between more and less market power for businesses. It is very interesting to see an analysis of this kind in terms of the legal framework. While law has hardly been ignored by economists, this big picture, historical perspective provides much food for thought. As Christophers puts it in the introduction, modern political economy has tended to focus more on the sphere of production, whereas competition and IP law concern the sphere of exchange. Yet many of the flash points in public policy today concern exactly competition and intellectual property, precisely because the basic productive structure of the economy is being changed by technology. The two spheres meet.

This means [amazon_link id=”0674504917″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Leveler[/amazon_link] is an important contribution to understanding some of the most acute modern policy – and political – questions. The analysis of the first half is followed by two chapters looking at the historical experience of the US and UK from the late 19th century, and a final chapter on 21st century monopoly. Recent decades have seen the phase of the cycle where enforcement of competition diminishes and enforcement of IP protection increases. Christophers links this to the Chicago School of economics, with its powerful impact on public policy on both sides of the Atlantic. He sees little sign that this has changed even now: “Post-Chicago developments have certainly entailed meaningful changes in antitrust thinking and practice, but such changes ultimately amount to small beer compared to the changes that the Chicago revolution itself heralded.” The ‘post-Chicago’ work of economists such as Jean Tirole, Christophers argues, have concerned specific business practices or mergers rather than the framework of competition law as a whole.

As for policy approaches to intellectual property, there is little sign of any recent redressing of the balance, for all the forceful concerns many people – academics and regulators – have voiced about excessive protection, from the TRIPS clauses to copyright madness. Indeed, this chapter argues that strong IP protection was deemed pro-competitive by Chicago-flavoured thinkers (I’m afraid Christophers does use the adjective ‘neoliberal’, although it obscures rather than clarifies matters, given that so many non-economists use it to describe all economists, as if there were no differences of opinion or political philosophy in my professsion). He underlines the irony that ‘pro-market’ can mean either pro-competition (citing early Mont Pelerin economists such as Lionel Robbins) or ‘pro-business’ (ie anti-competition), as – he argues – many law-and-economics  ‘neoliberals’ are today.

The book concludes: “Political economy never sits still.” This is a terrifically interesting book, one for anybody interested in political economy, or just in the narrower canvas of law and economics.

There’s no doubt the plates are shifting again now, although who knows where they will take us – the political and economic forces undermining the post-1980s structure are powerful, yet there is no alternative intellectual framework, in contrast to the preparedness of the early Chicago School in the mid to late 20th century. I was much struck by Daniel Stedman Jones’s account in [amazon_link id=”0691161011″ target=”_blank” ]Masters of the Universe[/amazon_link] of the systematic preparation of that earlier generation of economists to change the public philosophy – decades-worth of research and influencing. It’s clear – especially after reading [amazon_link id=”0674504917″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Leveler[/amazon_link] – that the balance ought to tilt back now away from monopoly protection toward competition enforcement, as the dominant model of capitalism is self-undermining. But who knows how or whether that will come about? Christophers ends with Lenin’s prediction that the future is capitalist monopoly on the international stage, monopoly imperialism. I have more confidence in self-correcting mechanisms. We will see.

PS. Christopher May, much cited in The Great Leveler, is the author of [amazon_link id=”B00ZY8G016″ target=”_blank” ]The Rule of Law: The Common Sense of Global Politics[/amazon_link], published in paperback last year. I haven’t read it, but it offers an explanation of why global politics so often seems to turn on legal issues. “In accessible terms, Christopher May argues that we can no longer merely use the idea of the rule of law without question but rather must appreciate its multifaceted and contested character if we are to begin to understand how and why it is now seen as a ‘good thing’ across the political spectrum,” according to the blurb.

[amazon_image id=”B00ZY8G016″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Rule of Law: The Common Sense of Global Politics by Christopher May (2014) Hardcover[/amazon_image]

What would Galbraith think about Google?

Posted on by

I’ve been grazing along the shelf of my old Penguin economics texts and stumbled on this quote from J.K.Galbraith’s (1952) [amazon_link id=”1560006749″ target=”_blank” ]American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power[/amazon_link] (in M.A.Utton’s [amazon_link id=”0140801723″ target=”_blank” ]Industrial Concentration[/amazon_link]): “The modern industry of a few large firms is an excellent instrument for  inducing technical change. It is admirably equipped for financing technical development and for putting it into use. The competition of the competitive world, by contras, almost completely precludes technical development.”

[amazon_image id=”B0010JYWD6″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]American Capitalism[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0140801723″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Industrial Concentration (Modern Economic Texts)[/amazon_image]

Galbraith is talking complete nonsense, of course. As this little textbook points out in the next paragraph: “The supposed antithesis between price competition and innovation is false: they are different forms of the same competitive process. Innovation is competition.” Many is the oligopolistic industry that has failed to innovate. As Will Baumol pointed out in his book [amazon_link id=”069111630X” target=”_blank” ]The Free Market Innovation Machine[/amazon_link], big firms tend to do incremental innovation, while radical innovation tends to come from small entrants.

This is the heart of the competition debate about Google etc. Will some new entrant come along an torpedo it in the search market, or has it through its scale effectively foreclosed new entry? Critics of the EU competition authorities’ assault on Google (including this week Barack Obama – but listen here to Martha Lane-Fox demolish him) point to its continuing record of innovation; but from another perspective, that looks like it leveraging its scale advantages into new markets, something dominant firms always try to do. I’m with Tim Wu, whose fabulous book [amazon_link id=”1848879865″ target=”_blank” ]The Master Switch[/amazon_link] argues that the opportunity for new entrants to cause upheaval in technology and communication markets has always been created by a regulatory intervention.

[amazon_image id=”1848879865″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”069111630X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Free-Market Innovation Machine: Analyzing the Growth Miracle of Capitalism[/amazon_image]

To be fair to Galbraith, this being one of his books I’ve not read, this summary suggests he was not relaxed about oligopoly power; however, he suggests the ‘countervailing power’ of organised labour is the way to control it. I’m all for workers having adequate bargaining power in the labour market but fail to see how that fixes a lack of competition in product markets. Google’s workers are very well treated. I wonder what Galbraith would make of these modern business titans?

Fast and slow thoughts about extended warranties

Posted on by

Dozing through the early business news this morning, I heard that extended warranties are back in the frame for offering consumers a bad deal (I’ll add the link when the programme is up on the iPlayer). It brought back memories. More than ten years ago (in 2002-3), I was a member of a Competition Commission inquiry into the UK extended warranties market.

For the great majority of consumers, these service or insurance contracts on domestic electrical goods are never a good deal. Appliances are well covered against malfunction by manufacturers’ warranties and UK consumer law, and often against accidental damage by normal domestic insurance policies too; and are anyway not all that prone to breaking down these days. The expected cost of repair bills or replacement is sufficiently low that most people are better off self-insuring (i.e. using their savings). A small number of cash-constrained (i.e. poor) people will benefit from paying for an extended warranty when they have the money upfront, but that’s about it.

At the time on the Competition Commission, we debated whether or not we should ban the sale of the warranties in-store. It was a close call – we decided instead to insist that stores display the warranty price alongside the price of the item so customers had a bit of time to think about it rather than (as was then the norm) being pressed to buy one when paying at the till.

With hindsight, I think we should have banned their sale in stores. Knowing what we now do about behavioural insights – especially how bad people are at assessing probabilities and expected values – would have tipped the decision, I think. The OFT looked at the market again in 2011, and the ombudsman is still saying the market isn’t working well for consumers. Oxera has a nice report about behavioural insights for these products. The right behavioural remedy it alludes to in the conclusion is probably to stop people having to decide under any pressure at all whether or not to buy one – they should do so at home, at leisure, and stores could always send them home with a form or email them a link. Maybe a copy of Kahneman’s [amazon_link id=”0141033576″ target=”_blank” ]Thinking, Fast and Slow[/amazon_link] as well?

[amazon_image id=”0141033576″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Thinking, Fast and Slow[/amazon_image]

A Nobel Prize for real world economics

Posted on by

The news that this year’s Nobel memorial prize in economics has gone to Jean Tirole is absolutely excellent, a really well-deserved award. I’m not going to compete with the swift and thorough summary already put out by Tyler Cowen. But I do want to add one comment just in case there are people out there thinking, why on earth has the prize gone to an economist who does theoretical, highly mathematical work – isn’t that yet another sign of how remote from the real world the whole discipline of economics has become? No economist who knows Tirole’s work will think so, and I’m sure there will be general delight about his selection, but maybe there are others who might make this mistake.

This is of course a common complaint about economics. It’s only partly true, and therefore partly false. There are for sure some economists who rely too much on basically very simple mathematics to gussy up economic analysis that doesn’t really need any equations. However, often economic thinking about the messy, complicated real world gets to a point at which the inter-relationships between variables are so knotty that mathematics is better able than words to keep track of them. The results are sometimes surprising.

Jean Tirole’s mathematics is of this kind. For example, in the work I know on two-sided markets (those where a platform stands between buyers and sellers), competition and market power look very different than they do in conventional markets like those for clothes or haircuts – so the conclusions competition authorities should draw from pricing on one side of the market might be very different from the usual ones. As the Scientific Background paper says:

“Tirole’s models have sharpened policy analysis. Focusing on the fundamental
features that generate a divergence between private and public interests, Tirole has
managed to characterize the optimal regulation of specific industries. Often, his rigorous
thinking has overturned previous conventional wisdom. For example, he successfully challenged the once prevalent view that monopoly power in one market cannot be profitably leveraged into another market by vertical integration. As a result, competition authorities have become more alert to the potential dangers posed by vertical integration and restraints. More generally, Tirole has shown how the justifications for public intervention frequently boil down to problems of information asymmetries and credible commitments. These general lessons — together with a catalogue of specific applications — form a robust foundation for policy analysis.”

His research has built the fundamental methods for the applied study of actual markets characterised by information asymmetries, moral hazard, lock-in, the exercise of power – features that are all too prevalent in the real world of business. It has huge practical relevance to regulators, including in the financial sector, and competition authorities. As Tyler points out, Tirole has also written on intrinsic motivation versus financial incentives.

The example of his work emphasises a broader point, which is that appropriate mathematics is essential in economics. And as Tony Yates recently pointed out, the maths needed as economics – thank goodness – gets ever closer to the real world is likely to get harder and harder. Say, if the subject takes more seriously non-linear dynamic systems, or strategic interactions between firms with different degrees of market power in a network market. Having said that, I always like F.Y.Edgeworth’s advice to regard mathematics as a kind of intellectual scaffolding, essential for the construction process, but preferably to be removed at the end.

[amazon_image id=”B00MF1FVTC” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Theory Of Industrial Organization by TIROLE JEAN (1988) Paperback[/amazon_image]