Could it be that the bloom is off of the daily deal rose? The news out of daily deal land these last few weeks has been grim. It has made those last few lazy, hazy days of summer, well, a little crazy too, if you are in the deal business or thinking about getting into […]

The Basics – NSTIC and The Identity Ecosystem
On April 15, the White House announced the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) – a long-awaited framework for enhancing online security, while in theory, maintaining privacy, efficiency and consumer choice. The NSTIC paper outlines a public/private sector cooperative effort to develop and implement an Identity […]

Reader Warning: My usually sunny demeanor has been replaced by a little crankiness, given an unfortunate, unintended consequence of the snow and ice that has plagued Boston for what seems like months now. Last Tuesday, I slipped on the ice and broke my right wrist. And yes, I am right-handed. The surgery Friday and a […]

Getting a new product off the ground is one of the great challenges in business. That’s well documented for entrepreneurs. VCs don’t get any return from more than 40 percent of their first-round investments and get back less than they put in for two-thirds. I haven’t come across any stats for major companies that launch […]

There’s a lot of speculation about the recent move by

“Network effect” strategy – once you tip the scale, growth is (hopefully) soon to follow. At least that’s what long time platform master Microsoft has experienced and what

Let’s begin with a puzzle raised by the previous session on who should regulate consumer protection. We heard from a specialist in administrative law that the design of the current method of bank supervision is the worst regulatory system she has ever seen. The fact that the regulators are paid by the banks (that is […]

David Evans’ paper, Markets with Two-Sided Platforms, discusses how these two-sided platform businesses serve distinct groups of customers and need each other in some way. They provide these customers a real or virtual meeting place, and they facilitate the interactions between members of these customer groups. They essentially act as intermediaries between the two groups […]

The Review of Network Economics Journal features “The Economics of the Online Advertising Industry” by David S. Evans.
This article considers the Internet-based technologies that are revolutionizing the global advertising industry and the public policy issues they engender. Will a single ad platform emerge or will several remain viable? What are the consequences of alternative […]

Earlier this week the Federal Trade Commission had an amazing two-day workshop on How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington and many others presented. I gave a talk on Advertising-Supported Media and the Future of Traditional Journalism how the role of advertising and two-sided markets would affect the evolution of the […]