Strategic Limitation of Market Accessibility: Search Platform Design and Welfare

Christopher The, Chengsi Wang and Makoto Watanabe

No 23-004E, CIGS Working Paper Series from The Canon Institute for Global Studies

Abstract: This paper explores the relation ship between market accessibility and various participants welfare in an intermediated directed-search market. For a general class of meeting technologies, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which efficiency requires imperfect accessibility, such that each sellers listing is only observed by some but not all buyers. We show that the platform optimally implements the efficient out come, but fully extracts surplus from the transactions it intermediates. We also find that in general, buyers prefer to minimize market accessibility, while sellers prefer a weakly greater accessibility level than that which is socially efficient. The efficiency of imperfect accessibility is robust to the introduction of a second chance for unmatched buyers to search.

Keywords: meeting technology; directed search; platform; intermediation; accessibility JEL Classification: D83; J64; M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Strategic limitation of market accessibility: Search platform design and welfare (2024)
Working Paper: Strategic Limitation of Market Accessibility: Search Platform Design and Welfare (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cnn:wpaper:23-004e

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