Platform competition and incumbency advantage under heterogeneous switching cost — exploring the impact of data portability

Paolo Siciliani and Emanuele Giovannetti

No 839, Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: The paper develops a static model to explore how, under platform competition, heterogeneous levels of switching costs can give rise to an incumbency advantage. The key condition required for the coexistence of both platforms on the market, to have effective competition, relies on the relative strength of switching costs over the network effects. Only when switching costs are stronger than cross-group network benefits is market tipping avoided. The same condition also underpins the presence of a material incumbency advantage vis-à-vis the entrant platform. Therefore, regulatory intervention aimed at facilitating switching, for example by imposing data portability, might worsen entry condition as the incumbent platform is less accommodative. Besides the standard configuration with exogenous singlehoming, we also fully characterise the model with endogenous multihoming on both sides. Partial multihoming occurs only on one side, the one with comparatively lower switching costs. However, in contrast to the seminal ‘competition bottleneck’ model, on the opposite side, where singlehoming arises endogenously, agents face higher prices than under exogenous singlehoming. Therefore, the incumbent platform would normally opt for this regime, whereas we show that the entrant is basically indifferent between the two.

Keywords: two-sided markets; platform competition; switching costs; multihoming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2019-12-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind, nep-mic, nep-net, nep-ore, nep-pay and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boe:boeewp:0839

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