Two-sided market

A two-sided market, also called a two-sided network, is an intermediary economic platform having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. The organization that creates value primarily by enabling direct interactions between two (or more) distinct types of affiliated customers is called a multi-sided platform.^[1] This concept of two-sided markets has been mainly theorised by the French economists Jean Tirole and Jean-Charles Rochet and Americans Geoffrey G Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne.

Two-sided networks can be found in many industries, sharing the space with traditional product and service offerings. Example markets include credit cards (composed of cardholders and merchants); health maintenance organizations (patients and doctors); operating systems (end-users and developers); yellow pages (advertisers and consumers); video-game consoles (gamers and game developers); recruitment sites (job seekers and recruiters); search engines (advertisers and users); and communication networks, such as the Internet. Examples of well known companies employing two-sided markets include such organizations as American Express (credit cards), eBay (marketplace), Taobao (marketplace in China), Facebook (social medium), LinkedIn (professional media), Mall of America (shopping mall), Match.com (dating platform), AIESEC (leadership development for youth by placing talent in companies), Monster.com (recruitment platform), and Sony (game consoles).

Benefits to each group demand economies of scale. Consumers, for example, prefer credit cards honored by more merchants, while merchants prefer cards carried by more consumers. Two-sided markets are particularly useful for analyzing the chicken-and-egg problem of standards battles, such as the competition between VHS and Beta. They are also useful in explaining many free pricing or "freemium" strategies where one user group gets free use of the platform in order to attract the other user group.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}