Multi-sided platforms

Abstract

Multi-sided platforms (MSPs) have been around for several centuries. Only recently, however, MSPs have become prominent in the economy, especially due to the internet and digitization wave across many industries. The idea behind MSPs is simple: they connect two or more interdependent user groups, by playing an intermediation or a matchmaking role (Gawer 2014; Evans and Schmalensee 2016). Thus, MSPs are tightly related to electronic markets; they actually show a progress in our current understanding of this phenomenon (Alt and Klein 2011), which denotes “all forms of networked business where multiple suppliers and customers interact for economic purposes within one or among multiple tiers in economic value chains” (Alt and Zimmermann 2014, p. 162). Note, however, that the concept of electronic markets has been around for several decades, even before the start of scientific research in this field and the inception of the Electronic Markets Journal in 1991.