I have always been up for a challenge. I read just last week a quote from someone from Forrester who basically said that anyone who believes Facebook is the commerce frontier is basically smoking something. (Well, what he said was that they had about as much credibility as the guy who bought billboards predicting the […]

Click here to download this article as a PDF.

This article is part of the February issue of the Lydian Journal.

Editor’s Note
A number of very large and significant platform industries are converging on a common opportunity – to create and grow consumer commerce. Payments capabilities certainly underpin this convergent trend. Yet increasingly, the power in the […]

Introduction
Many Americans, feeling chunky and lethargic from their Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve eating binges, will be making resolutions to exercise more and eat less during 2011. Some will sign up for a health club. They could get day and monthly passes. But so confident they are that this will be the year they will […]

On this seventh day of Christmas, are you, too, having trouble finding those elusive seven swans a-swimmin’? Well, it just might be that one of the thousands of online deal and/or group buying sites might have just what you are looking for at a price that is at least 50% off the suggested retail purchase […]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s payment network consolidation in the US and Europe, resulted in a world with only 3 global credit card brands – Visa, MasterCard and American Express, supported by a host of regional/ local debit solutions.  However, the desire to avoid the dominance of US brands and expand their domestic card markets, […]

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 […]