Strategic Decisions for Multisided Platforms

Multisided platforms such as eBay and Facebook create value by enabling interactions between two or more customer groups. But building and managing a winning platform isn’t easy.

By Andrei Hagiu

Multisided platforms (MSPs) are technologies, products or services that create value primarily by enabling direct interactions between two or more customer or participant groups. Prominent examples of MSPs and the participants they connect include Alibaba.com, eBay, Taobao and Rakuten (buyers and sellers); Airbnb (dwelling owners and renters); the Uber app (professional drivers and passengers); Facebook (users, advertisers, third-party game or content developers and affiliated third-party sites); Apple’s iOS ...